You want to move your drives to your mainboard because a lot of those cheap adapters suck. Unreliable and they can buckle under load. Can be a PITA.
If there is performance to gain depends on how accurate your information is, what drives you use, and how.
My backups are tiered. Some stuff gets no backup at all, some gets even more than 3.And I tend to reuse HDDs that got replaced in my main machine due to size for my backups. Power consumption hardly matters when it only runs for a few minutes a day.
It is impossible to fully eliminate the risk but with a decent backup system in place it is somewhat unlikely to lose all of your data.
The 321rule should be used as a baseline. Your local backup should be snapshotted and somewhat hardened against ransomware (pull backups instead of pushing them, do not mount the backup volume to other machines). Cold backups also help.
Can I construct scenarios in which I lose all my stuff? Sure. But in those, we are either in deep shit anyway (CME, some big astroid) or it is pretty unlikely (targeted hacking)
i heard some people can 'wipe' the S.M.A.R.T data which will make it look like new? is it true?
Yes.
Archiving modern websites is rather tricky. There are tons of servers involved and they often run some software themself. These are black boxes that cannot be archived without direct help from the web admins. For this reason, archived sites are often broken in some minor or major way.
Without a link, it is pretty hard to help you with your specific problem.
As I said this is something they cannot deal well with.
Only to carry a few files or whatever from one PC to another. They are just too unreliable, get lost or damaged too easily and their performance almost always sucks.
Unless you have to have your data always available a single 16TB drive will work just fine. ~£200 for the drive and it also consumes 10W and not 40. Likely pretty relevant in the long run in the UK.
And when you need more storage use Unraid or mergerFS+Snapraid on Openmediavault. They both allow you to add single drives of any size to add storage capacity and parity. ZFS is great but it kinda sucks as a home user as expansion only works well when you add 6 or even 12 drives at a time. At least for now.
Get a NAS. Unless you are tech savvy and dedicated get a Synology. You can get another Synology or hook up a USB drive for backups.
To backup and manage your photos you might run Immich in a docker. Although some people also like Synology's own solution.
because I always write 100% full random data on the device before using it.
Do you mean before every use or after receiving it?
When you continuously write to a consumer SSD they will slow down for a while. They are built for short burst of writes because that is what most consumers do. For continuous fast writing you need better NAND, a better controller and better cooling.
for a very long time
Long term digital archiving is not really a solved issue. Your best bet is an active approach with multiple copies that are checked regularly.
Is this your boot drive? If so it should have been replaced by an SSD like a decade ago.
Every drive can fail at any moment. Even a brand new one. It is just a bit less likely than having a decade old drive fail.
If you care about your data make sure you have backups. 321rule.
Yes, you can use a "NAS" drive pretty much like any normal drive. This is an SMR drive so not even a NAS drive to begin with.
If you do not have backups pay a professional to recover it. Yes, this is wildly expensive but tinkering yourself can make recovery even more expensive or outright impossible.