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For you and others, a couple of questions or thoughts: 1) Should one's external HHDs be replaced periodically, e.g. when they reach 5 years of age? I just checked the 4 HDs that I use to back up my MBAir w/ DriveDx - all were perfectly fine and several are 3+ years old - of course, another alternative is to have redundant BU drives, and replace the ones that die;
You sort of answered your own question. Your plan depends on how valuable your data is. The more valuable it is, the more places it should be backed up to.
The Backblaze study indicates that hard drives start becoming importantly unreliable after their third year, and possibly unacceptably unreliable after their fifth year. However, many RDHD's last for many years beyond that. It's up to you how much you want to invest in protecting your data.
2) As these external SSDs drop in price, the question becomes whether to replace old HHDs w/ SSDs, of course the latter can die also;
SSD's, very surprisingly, even though they can theoretically last for 20 years or more, in the real world aren't any more reliable than RDHD's. They are more resistant to jarring (and hence they are good for use on the go with a laptop), and if attached to a fast bus, they can perform better than a RDHD. Frankly, I don't see that an EXTERNAL SSD is worth the extra cost over a RDHD. Usually you want a bigger external hard drive, not a faster one. It's your internal hard drive that can benefit most noticeably and frequently from the improved performance of an SSD.
3) The Glyph HDs look excellent w/ a great warranty - I'm assuming this manufacturer does not make their own internal drives, does anyone know which brand(s) are used in their products?
I get asked this constantly, the answer is....it's irrelevant. You are putting your faith in Glyph, not in the company (or companies) that they get their mechanisms from. Glyph's reputation is really something. Check out their reviews on Amazon, and do a Google search for reviews. (To answer your question directly, they source their internal mechanisms almost exclusively from Seagate. But these mechanisms are unlikely to be exactly the same as the consumer-class mechanisms that you or I can buy on Amazon.)
Glyph gets internal mechanisms that meet their specifications, and then they carefully test each mechanism to insure its reliability. (Note that a dirty little secret in the hard drive mechanism industry is that consumer class drives are not tested AT ALL once assembled. The components are tested, but not the completed drive. Enterprise class drives do sometimes get a short burn-in. Fierce competition and paper thin margins produced this situation.)
Glyph then puts the raw drive mechanism in a case that they have designed to provide thermal stability, and which has excellent electronics and a stout power supply. These are weak features from just about any other manufacturer of external hard drives these days.
I've been recommending Glyph drives for a bunch of years now, and to quite a few users. So far, out of hundreds of users who I know who have purchased one, I've only heard from one user who has suffered a failure. (I can't say the same for any other brand of hard drive.) And they were subsequently made happy by Glyph's support. When you see a Glyph drive in person for the first time, you'll instantly get a feel for why they're better. These things are really over-engineered...the tank of hard drives. Ventilated steel/aluminum case, substantial internal power supply, internal fan, heavy duty wiring.
Once again, it all depends on how much your time is worth, and how much your data is worth. If your time and data are worth very little, any cheap POS hard drive will probably do fine for you. If your time and data are very valuable to you, you might want to pay a bit more for the best. Note Glyph offers data recovery as part of their warranty. A third party hard drive recovery service won't charge the difference in price between a Glyph drive and a POS drive. A hard drive recovery service will likely charge at least a couple thousands dollars. Glyph has such faith in their products that they offer data recovery for free under warranty.