How to determine HDD health with a reasonable degree of certainty?

[cdhowie]

It is generally better to run a storage node per disk instead of using RAID.

Best Practices for multiple hard disks

Note that the network stores data redundantly. A lost node doesn’t mean the data is lost, it just means you don’t hold it and therefore don’t profit from it anymore. To put it another way, you will almost certainly make more revenue running a node on each disk rather than building a RAID1. With a RAID1 your node could last forever, but you are nearly halving your revenue potential. (If you have many disks, RAID5 could make sense just because it will save you time having to set up a new node …