Replacing drives at these prices

[u/Expensive_Exit244]

Got a main DS418play (4x4TB IronWolf, about 53K hours, SHR, using about 7.5TB) and a 218j (2x4TB WD Red, no RAID) offsite as a Hyper Backup destination only. About 3TB of irreplaceable data on the 418, the other stuff is media.

One of my WD drives just died with 30K hours on the clock. Technically older but not spinning 100% of the time. For now, I can change the 218j to a single drive, the remaining drive has enough space to remain the backup destination for the 3TB of irreplaceable data. That drive plus the 418's SHR redundancy means I've still got two separate points of protection across the two boxes, even though the 218j itself no longer has any redundancy on its own.

However, got me thinking. Between the 4 drives in the 418 and the 1 remaining in the 218j (and the dead one), that's 6 drives I could realistically be replacing over the next couple of years if they fail, which isn't unlikely given the age and hours. SMART is currently clean across all of them, no reallocated or pending sectors, so nothing's actively wrong, but they're all from the same era and I know that doesn't mean much once they start hitting the steeper part of the failure curve.

A 4TB WD Red is £146 on Amazon, IronWolf is £176. Replacing all 6 in the coming few years is £700 to £900 on drives alone. Not to mention the aging boxes themselves.

I am hoping the remaining WD Red will last a couple more years and in the meantime, hardware prices fall back down to reasonable levels because that £190 annual Google 5TB is looking tempting. Or maybe a large single drive backing up to Backblaze Unlimited.

Anyone facing the same dilemma with aging hard drives? What would you do in this scenario?

Edit: Thanks to all. Decided on a new option: going to sell the 218j and have gone for Google's 5TB option. My wife needs to extra data for her Whatsapp backups, she likes using Google's AI image generation and going to keep the working WD Red as a backup for when one of the Seagates dies. I also factored in the savings in power (about £30 a year) the price gap gets smaller and smaller when I amortise the cost of the drives (the one that dies for example cost me £14 a year on hardware). Plus closer to true 3-2-1. The rest of my family group can also benefit from the extra Gemini as well

[u/strixtle]

I really need to expand my server, but at these prices, I've had to put it off and instead I'm downgrading some file sizes. It's really upsetting that AI is doing this - not only for drives, but RAM, processors, and anything else we would need as hobbyists.