And there goes the Video card market again. It was dumb when people blamed NVidia for the 4090 prices going up. Watch as everyone changes their narrative. Hypocrisy is a hell of thing.

The manufactures software. In your case

https://support-en.wd.com/app/products/downloads/softwaredownloads

WD Drive Utilities

Western Digital Dashboard

It is expected that some sectors fail over time. The HD is provision with extra space to account for this. The SMART threshold is what you should look at.

outside of a few games, my 2700 holds up well. Too bad it’s effin slow with TrueNAS.

The only useful case I would consider for partitions is if you want to perform a clean install of windows, but don’t want to back-up data which would be kept on the second partition and only had a single storage device. Seems like you have access to multiple storage devices so partitions don’t seem to be a good idea.

Outside of that I hate partitions but that stems from an age when storage was expensive. To many times I found myself having enough free space spread across partitions but not enough in a single location to copy or install something. To me directories/folders were enough of a separation for organising stuff.