Taxing a hard drive with music file access? Not a chance. Music access performs very little stress to a hard drive. When I was working in the IT sector for over 40 years, I dealt with very large databases running on million dollar storage systems and the last 10 years worked for companies that sold hard drives and solid state storage products. Most of us use personal hard drives and ssd/nvme products, not the enterprise rated products and there are big differences in quality and speed. If you want redundancy, I’ve used all the different RAID configurations, and for music, I would use a hardware RAID 5 configuration in either a 3 disk configuration, which results in faster reads but slower writes. In music and video, it’s a write once and read many times environment, perfect for RAID 5. Also, I would never use personal grade solid state storage for caching or for backups. Caching will wear out a personal grade SSD much faster because of the lack of enough overprovisioning that an enterprise SSD provides and the lack of TRIM on certain OS’s.
For my Roon database, I use a standalone 5TB drive, no RAID/no redundancy, and back it up daily to a 8TB disk. I also have another 8TB backup disk stored in a safe that every couple of months, I take my current backup disk and store it in the safe and then reuse the backup drive from the safe as my current backup. I’ve had to restore my mac a couple of times in the last 20/30 years and the backups have always worked flawlessly to restore the Mac.
I also don’t use the portable usb powered disks, I use the bigger vented external powered disks. As for SSD for music, more quiet, but also overkill. I use an SSD/nvme device for my boot drive mainly to run the Roon index structure on it for faster access, but all the TBs of music files are on an external hard drive.
For my Roon database, I use a standalone 5TB drive, no RAID/no redundancy, and back it up daily to a 8TB disk. I also have another 8TB backup disk stored in a safe that every couple of months, I take my current backup disk and store it in the safe and then reuse the backup drive from the safe as my current backup. I’ve had to restore my mac a couple of times in the last 20/30 years and the backups have always worked flawlessly to restore the Mac.
I also don’t use the portable usb powered disks, I use the bigger vented external powered disks. As for SSD for music, more quiet, but also overkill. I use an SSD/nvme device for my boot drive mainly to run the Roon index structure on it for faster access, but all the TBs of music files are on an external hard drive.