I thought this video was rather interesting, because at 12:27, the presenter crunches the numbers to find out how many years it would take for a new computer purchase to be more environmentally friendly (in regards to total CO2 expended) compared to using a less efficient used model.
Depending on the specific use case, it could take as little as 3 years to breakeven in terms of CO2 if both systems were at max power draw forever, and as long as 30 if the systems are mostly at idle.
I am a hobby photographer and usually take a few hundred GBs of photos every year (I shoot in JPG+RAW), I have other media as well, but I am mainly concerned about my photos.
I have them currently saved to a single HDD in my computer, which has worked ok, but I have seen bitrot in some files…
So I was reliable storage, currently thinking of a zraid1 with four normal disks, one parity, one hot spare and one cold spare, I am looking for it to last a minimum of ten years with normal maintenance.
I will probably put 64GB ram in the server, and possibly an SSD cache over time