And then buy another external drive, 4TB or larger, and do it again. Preferably a different brand of drive inside, preferably a an enterprise storage drive. And keep it off-site.

Gopher was cool because it was way easier to follow references to other content on other sites than FTP, even if you often had to download the content and figure out which app was needed to display it. Xgopher was cooler yet because it could display images. Then Mosaic showed up, and had the ability to handle many more data types, and the fuse was lit... In the early 90s, everyone who knew anything about the 'Net knew where the main gophers were. Opened up communications a lot, and was far more direct than Usenet, which had already descended into being mostly noise by then. Great way to share information, 'til there was a greater one.

A RAID0 of 3 SSDs will be faster than a single SSD drive for multiple reasons, the primary one being that the kernel reads from all three devices at the same time, and (secondarily) both the SSDs and the kernel are doing read-ahead, so that once hundreds (if not thousands) of sectors are in memory, you're only looking at the time to copy them into the destination buffer. For more speed, set your read-ahead buffers up - /sys/devices/(device)/hostX/targetX:0:0/X:0:0:0/block/sde/queue/read_ahead_kb, in Linux... Usually defaults to 128KB....

As a software engineer with 30 years under my belt, I'd answer "I find doing the work and solving the problems far more rewarding than managing a team". Being the software lead is fine; I've found that being management doesn't do it for me.

Let's see - which might be more valuable: the car, or your life? Put the car in neutral and let the engine blow up (or sit at it's rev limit).

True enough. Simplistically, if ETOH as a fuel is viable as a fuel (or additive), take away the government subsidy and let's see if it can make it on it's own. I'm betting that it can't.

If ETOH were actually worth anything (i.e., didn't harm engines, was *really* energy balance positive, didn't put aldehydes into the atmosphere, cause food prices to go up, could be produced from cellulose, etc.) it could survive without a government subsidy. The only reason it's still lurching along, taking up 40% of the corn produced in the USA, is because the lobbyists, farmers and ETOH producers can continue to suck $$ from the US gummint.

I wouldn't mention the Samsungs in the same sentence as Dells running Sandisk SSDs - there's a world of difference between the Samsung and Sandisk SSDs. We found that the IDE interface on the Sandisks was being reset under moderate usage - which might account for the "hangs" you mention. Have yet to see any resets on the (IDE interface) Samsung drives.