I live in a small apartment (40 m², about 430 sqft), and I still like to buy physical media (although that doesn't mean everything I own has to be on physical media).

For me it's mostly music (~700 CDs, ~500 LPs), and a handful of DVDs/BluRays. I guess I just like to have that stuff around me. If Amazon/Netflix/Spotify/Deezer/whatever other streaming services there are all shut down tomorrow I don't even care...

Am I just dumb? Why would one connect a drive to a NAS, move files around, then connect that drive to another machine? Why wouldn't you just access the NAS from... idk... the network?

not just assume anything's saved. Verify it's saved.

Same goes for your backup backup backup, btw...

This.

I learned that back in the days of "this video is not available in your country because Sony/BMG/GEMA/whoever said so."

Well, let's see:

the smallest (and therefore oldest) Disks I have in my NAS right now read 9 years, 0 months and 23 days. Pretty sure I've got some in cold storage with higher power on numbers (and even older manufacture dates, of course).

I had no backup

Well... no pity from me then.

This was recently linked by someone else regarding SSDs ans SMART data. Hope it helps, but it's basically "there's only a few standardized-ish and relevant-ish attributes for SSDs".

Not with Seagates, but I've recently bought two refurbished 12TB drives to use in a Raid1.
I figured since they're in a RAID and there's gonna be a backup, I can take the risk.