As it was said, you may try unRAID which would handle even the different size drives.

As alternative, it looks like mdadm should fit your requirements. You can use smth like openmediavault for that.

I would definitely contact seller for that. Warranty is one of the things why you get the new drive, at least that is critical to me. Return the drive if they would refuse to provide you with the warranty.

It really depends on your needs. If you can go with 20TB over 22TB and it won’t create any issues than better deal for 20tb drive makes more sense.

Try to connect the drives in another machine without enclosure if possible.

It is normal if you have the encrypted drive. If you want it to show up normally without password on any machibe than remove encryption.

I do not think, that this rate will make much sense for users since it will be visible with the huge amount of drives. So, I will still look for the best deals on the drives rather than brand.

For the mixed size drives, I believe, one of the best options are unRAID and mergerfs with snapraid. Also, if you want to use windows, stablebit drivepool would make it and snapraid can be used for redundancy.

Get an HDD for it. Internal or external, depends on you.

Alternatively, you may store it in Backblaze personal.

As a common source, obviously, internet archive is my choice. If I cannot find anything there, I start googling, so basically no favourite archive repositories for me.

As it was mentioned, it’s the normal prize now. Just check the prices next time for alternatives or check on a few sellers.

You just check the best $?TB ratio and warranty time. That’s really all the things you need when choosing the drive. Also, remember that there are only 3 brands Seagate, WD and Toshiba to look for.

Depends on your configuration.

If you do not need to passthrough the whole HBA to a VM for example, then, just go with the most convenient way for you.

Check the specs and decide on your choice. Also, depending on your workload maybe the best option is to get the cheapest drive.

I follow it for the most critical data, other data get just one copy (but those data is not important to me)

Even if it grows, if you found a good deal on Black Friday you just get it because the price is good nothing else.

I have offsite location as my cloud cloud backup. That’s basically, it.

Not really much options there. Depends on the budget as well, but you won’t have anything close to the price of backblaze personal.

Remember to make backups of the healthy drives as well.

If you have a good deal already, just have them. If there any good deals on Black Friday, then get them as well. You cannot ever have too much drives ;)

I am not really sure about flashdrives, however, SanDisk SSDs are just horribly unreliable. Also, I would only use flashdrives for the temp data, not as the main media for any data.