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My father was deep into photography in that era and digitized all his photos. He was understandably paranoid about drive failures. The solution? ZIP disks everywhere! Cue massive family stress when the disk containing his competition entry was nowhere to be found and definitely in one of the kids rooms. It was, of course, found 3 days later in the glove box of his truck (thank you for reading my lowercase-t trauma dump).

> I remember back in the late nineties / early 2000s drive failures really were pretty common.

Yup. And most people wouldn't bother but typically you could RMA HDDs: the terms were quite generous. I was in Europe and did learn, as a teenager, how to RMA HDDs to get shiny replacements (IIRC for example for Seagate HDDs I'd send them to the Netherlands and then after a few weeks I'd get a new one by the mail).

I once screamed at a 2.1GB Seagate hard disk and it died.

Pretty crap.

cue the youtube video of the guy yelling at his JBOD array and watching the latency spike

Absolute gem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4

Wow I didn't realize it was Brendan Gregg doing the screaming. What a legend!