Right. So I could drop $2-3k on gaining experience from a meaningful sample size, all the while risking more lost business days, or I could just believe all those anecdotes it took me close to half a decade to convince myself to ignore. I've got bigger problems than seek latency, will retry in a couple more years.
Maybe you could try making backups next time?
Would certainly be smarter than banking on the reliability of a single HDD.
Unfortunately you can't back up billable hours, and carrying an entirely separate laptop or disk on the expectation that your main one will fail seems a bit too weird, especially when robust alternatives exist
As an hourly contractor as well, I back up everything to the cloud and have at least two laptops in a 'ready' state. Trusting hardware to work is... brave.