All photos are migrated from phones to a SSD Raid setup as space fills up. Wife copies some photos, prior to migration, to a Google Drive folder that is shared with extended family. We don't use 'traditional social media'. Photos are generally browsed monthly to yearly, as a method of 'keeping track of who we were'. Similar photos are deleted with a weak emphasis on keeping the 'best' variant.
I've just been using regular hard drives for my RAIDs with really long lifespans, think 7-10 years -- and even then replaced just out of caution, they still work -- and I'm not sure if this is also achievable with SSDs or what to even look out for
I've been buying Samsung drives for a few years and had no problems. My general strategy is stagger the buys, in order to /hopefully/ get drives from different manufacturing batches however the reason I'm using a RAID setup is so I don't have to stress over durability. If one or two drives do tank, oh well. Buy new ones, clone contents from one of the parallel drives and go on with life.
