F

well… not really if you are just wiping it.

Bite the bullet.

Just nuke it and never look back.

Or

Do the disk image thing and hope you have enough space for it.

The helium aspect is what i was focused on. My bad.

That said, the HAMR vs MAMR thing I see as being sorted for the most part as the release of these types of drives to the enterprise market gives me assurance as to the durability of them. "new’ only in that the drives have been somewhat recently come into the consumer arena.

Backblaze has always been pretty up front about what they use and how long they last. Here is an old article from 2018 and the upshot of using them for 5 years then is there seems to be little to no difference as to failure rates. With numbers. More drives than you will ever own. I’d go with their analysis.

I get down on my knees every month just to pray that I don’t need to use my back ups. Then, when the inevitable happens, I get down on my knees and pray thanks that I have my back ups.

More religious than anything else in my life. I have had numerous events occur over the past 2 decades and can confirm that restoring is so much easier and better than installing from scratch. Also data( in my case the usual pictures/movies/documents/etc) are at least duplicated on other media/devices/etc.

Press F for respect. she be a goner.