hey! thanks so much for responding, guys!!

and thank you for providing specific HDD brand names.  in doing my research and not understanding all the tech/spec meanings, i did stumble across a website that makes a list every year of the drives they're connected to and failure rates.  it was very thorough, but all those numbers and ratios and stuff - well, i just could not digest it all.

however, there was some info that i gleaned upon that suggested certain capacity/size HDDs have greater failure rates than others, though some of that data may be skewed simply because perhaps more people own a certain size, thus of course, more reported failures.  i did try to corroborate the findings against other reports, and again, it does seem that certain sizes within certain brands tend to lose viability sooner than others.  and i should have been taking notes, as i can't seem to find half the stuff i was looking over last week regarding all of this.

with all that in mind, what brands & specific names [such as the Seagate Iron Wolf that Lobo mentioned] AND sizes are you guys using?

again, many many thanks!!!