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In your case, being that it sounds like this will be a mission-critical device, I'd definitely buy a couple of whichever caddy you choose, and keep an empty one to hand as a cold-spare that you can transfer the drives over to if the main one fails.
The main thing however, and I can't stress this enough, is making sure you choose the actual storage drives wisely.
Avoid 'consumer' SSD drives. The actual flash chips are rated for far fewer write cycles than equivalent 'enterprise' drives, and the firmware is optimised for burst speed rather than sustained performance or resilience.
For example, for the beefy NAS servers I build for work, I fit Samsung PM9A3 drives, which are the enterprise versions of the consumer 980 Pro. The DWPD rating is much higher, and the write speeds quoted are lower but those figures can be sustained all day across the entire temperature range quoted, whereas the 980 Pro will quickly run out of SLC cache and bump down to a much lower sustained speed, then start throttling once it inevitably overheats.
Always do your research when it comes to actual SSD drives, never use consumer models, never use RAID0, and always keep spares to hand.
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ectoplasmosis
Thanks, shooting this week so can't give huge thought rn but I feel if it's going to be my main day to day storage for work (and would be a big hassle to solve/rebuild from backups if it failed) I'd be happy to pay a premium on housing and drives for perceived reliability. In the apple thread no less. I've no experience buying from AliExpress. I don't even know what it really is - presume Chinese Amazon? I'm sure it's fine but would just feel safer with owc or Gtech etc, regardless of whether they're built with the same ingredients. Presume also if there are failures or issues I'm better served from a known brand, buying through CVP or somewhere with a rep in a similar timezone, where I can ship a failed unit to Middlesex, rather than a brand I've never heard of shipping to the other side of the world.