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Totally! I have a friend who does sound engineering for hollywood and he has two firesafes full of HDDs, SSDs and TAPE with hundreds and hundreds of terabytes of data. I couldn't even finish the sentence "Have you tried the cl..." before he cut me off and was like: way too much data. Didnt have the heart to tell him two of those three media types need to be powered on periodically...

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Ow! Telling him would be a kindness.

HDDs can't require powering all that periodically. I just found my hard drive from college, and plugging it into my computer just worked. Great finding all my old documents and music that I'd forgotten about.

The lubricants might settle, causing sticking of various components when you try to power it on after a long time.

If your drive uses ZFS you apparently need to power it on more regularly than that to avoid bit rot.

Why would the file system affect bit rot rate?

It doesn't. What matters is that you have a filesystem that can detect and repair bitrot. For that to work, it needs to check everything occasionally, which means they need to be powered up occasionally.

If you don't do that, eventually you'll get to a point where it can't repair anything, and then you gain nothing over using a filesystem that doesn't do this, is the point.

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