The Sam Vimes “Boots” theory of socioeconomic unfairness, often called simply the boots theory, is an economic theory that people in poverty have to buy cheap and subpar products that need to be replaced repeatedly, proving more expensive in the long run than more expensive items.
Not if you use ZFS. But then you’ll need an extra drive for parity data
ZFS won’t save you the expense of having to replace crappy storage.
Without ZFS, when a drive starts making mistakes, it starts to corrupt some of your data, so it has to be replaced ASAP.
With ZFS RAIDz1, each transaction is double-checked and errors are corrected, so you don’t need to replace any drives until one of your drives is almost completely unusable.