Don’t buy books/video/music on physical media unless it’s hard/impossible to get a digital version. But also don’t rely on IP subscription services either. The Cloud is great as part of a backup strategy: but not as an exclusive service that could gate your access to your content.

Digital storage is great because it can hold anything: books, shows, games, whatever. And it can be easily copied, and sent around the world. Have some space you own: redundant and automatically backed-up to a Cloud service… then enjoy it for years. It will feed your ebook readers and media players and homelab devices for a long time, and take up almost no space.

Computers are so fast these days you can have entire VMs in the background and not even notice them. Since Win10/11 come with HyperV and WSL you don’t need to buy any separate hardware to start playing with homelba/Linux stuff.

All your options are within ±$150 of each other: so I’d grab the largest-usable config. If it also happens to be the lowest $/TB… that’s gravy. Pay those few extra dollars now and it may let the new setup run a couple extra years before it doesn’t meet your needs anymore.

I don’t stress over brand/model: parity configs take care of availability, and automated 321 backups take care of recoverability. Disks are consumables: any one of them could fail tomorrow: but you data should be immortal :)

If I’m buying new I’ll look at $/TB/years-of-warranty, but for refurbs you’re lucky to get a couple months so that doesn’t really sway my decision.

Enjoy all your new space!