My HDDs run 24/7 without spin up btw. I’m just talking about the costs. My drives don’t fail that much as yours. The recent drives that failed were WD Blue that were very old and only used for backups. And yes, all backups were still readable, even the drive was reported as failed. Compare it to SSDs that often fail “spectacularly”.
I’m a total newb when I use GUIs. I need max automation… I don’t really know how to do this. Also… I never had issues with drivers. And on Windows there is almost nothing installed. You need to install stuff by using a browser … horrible.