Toshiba enterprise 20 TB hard drive advice

Thanks again David. I’ll be formatting the drive with HFS+ for my primary daily-use data (no macOS), although I suppose I could set that to APFS as well despite reduced performance.

I’ve been hesitant to use APFS on a hard drive, since DiskWarrior doesn’t support it, and I don’t think there are any other repair utilities that do. My impression is APFS might be more reliable, but with only Disk Utility to rely on, it’s not very comforting. If the drive works out, I’ll buy a 2nd one to use for Time Machine and use APFS in that case.

Backblaze is a good source for drive reliability as Kevin suggested, and Toshiba has positive results there, although they don’t have the newer MG09 or MG10 models, or anything larger than 16 TB. Hopefully choosing the newer model 20 TB with one extra platter will be as safe as the older 18 TB. It all seems like a bit of luck.