I was not aware of that. Thank you very much for pointing out! So better download a Flatpak over an Appimage if provided.

I am currently downloading Flatpaks from Flathub as much as possible but some programs are not available on there. Or not verified and a community-maintained flatpak is just another attack surface for a MITM attack.

Thanks a lot, again! I think I will focus on active and backup drive (+remote for the few essentials) and only use RAID if it is easy (and cheap) to implement.

Do you have any tips how to implement the powering on and off automatically? And would it be possible to have both in the same case or is it necessary to separate them physically?

Thanks a lot for this elaboration!

Unfortunately, like mentioned in another comment below, Barracudas are now mostly SMR. And I didn't find offers for Barracudas Pro which should be CMR.

Anyways, I will most probably buy some smaller CMR drives. Take a bit more money in the hand now, lay out a proper backup strategy and only store data which can not be easily re-downloaded and I should be good.

So if you can use a hot spare is mainly depentend on the OS you use I suppose?

idk which naming scheme is worse: PCIe or USB. Not that I would know too much about transfer speeds but the plethora of different version surely doesn't help.

I will definitely have to do my homework on all of these transfer rates lol

SAS drives are way cheaper on eBay and such but I don't know if I feel confident enough to move from SATA to SAS for my first DIY NAS already. It sounds very easy with the PCIe SAS adapter but still daunting at the same time.

Yes I will definitely get a CMR drive, I read enough comments warning me about SMR lol

Yeah I should probably get a little bit extra money in hand but buy something good instead of some garbage.

Would you consider that better even if the backup drive is in the same house as the data drive, just powered off?

Very interesting take, if only SSDs would not be so expensive right now, damn!

But I should probably worry a lot more about my backup strategy than the drives. You are correct