I had two 4T Western Digital "black" drives. Both were prematurely complaining about bad sectors and one would require fsck to be run with lots of fixes. So these drives were clearly on the way out, this led to:
A 4T M.2 SSD drive to replace the main /u1 A 1T M.2 SSD drive to augment the above as /u2 A 8G Western Digital Ultrastar for backups.No more WD black for me! They are pitching those drives towards gamers these days and some homework educated me. The Ultrastar drives are targetting datacenter and enterprise users. I want reliability more than performance, so that switch makes sense. But both are 7200 RPM drives will identical amounts of cache, so performance should hardly be different.
A new case (Fractal Designs North) was required to fit the big RTX 3060, and while I was at it, I got a 750W Seasonic power supply and a new Noctua CPU cooler. The original OEM fan from Intel that came with the processor was doing OK, but with 8 years of continual spinning, it seemed reasonable to give it a break.
Also what wears out a SSD is writing, and my use pattern is pretty much a write once and then read forever sort of thing. The drives I have are rated for 600 times their capacity in writes before they give problems. So for a 1T drive you need to write 600T to it, and for a 4T drive you need to write 2400T to it! I am unlikely (to say the least) to ever do anything like completely rewriting the drive 600 times.