Surely there has to be more going on here. Prigozhin turning around, exile to Belarus, and now this doesn’t make sense with what’s been publicly reported.

I’ve had SSDs go bad. So if it’s something you really care about I’d approach it the same as hard disks.

Why is beehaw so high?

I would second this. A normal tower with a high quality psu and 5 drives is what I use for cheap storage. Obviously more failure prone than true enterprise hardware but a hell of a lot cheaper.

I’ll have to try out some ereader apps. I had this thought a few weeks ago but didn’t find any free apps in the little bit of looking I did. I’ll take a look at those you suggested.