Yeah, man, storage is storage. Once you get down the redundancy chain enough even a crappy salvage drive on its last legs may end up being a cost-effective way to prevent some data loss later.

I’m actively considering going on a drive plunder run of old, semi-busted hdds both at home and in used sales sites to eventually build a static redundancy backup of files I know aren’t going to change in the foreseeable future. Because why not.