If you are going to add to your collection of personal photos, I wouldn't limit my external drive to 400GB or even 1TB.

I went to three 8TB drives. One is the master and the other two are copies. One can go to your bank safety deposit box and the other two can be on your desk. Then process your little heart out.

I purchased Western Digital externals and I'm very happy with them. I replace them between 4 and 7 years old. (I'm just that way. I also change out all of my electrical surge protectors every 2-3 years. No I don't have a ton of money, but I value the experiences documented through my photos more than money. It seems that every year memory gets cheaper and it makes sense to have more capacity than needed.)

For the money that you pay for an EV, they're not a very good investment. If you really want one, that's fine. I have no problem with that...as long as you're accepting the risk.

On top of the fire risk that Jerry mentions, the batteries, from what I have read, are only warrantied for 4-5 years and after that you basically might was well get another EV because the cost to replace the battery is insane. I've had gas powered Toyotas for over 30 years of my life. I've had one Toyota Corolla that we had for 19 years and have another that's 14 years old. The others that we've had (Camrys, Siennas and Highlanders) that we've traded in after 6-8 years. I've only traded in one Highlander after 4 years because the dealer needed used inventory and gave me a great price on the old car.

Pure hype.

The maximum lifetime of any style of storage medium these days is probably less than 50 years. After that, the medium could be readable but the technology will have moved on so that you no longer can buy the readers/writers or update the drivers to new operating systems. How long did people use floppy disks? CDs/DVDs? Technology moving on will also mean that you will need larger capacity storage devices. The first home computers had less than a megabyte of storage. Now we're using Terabytes. What will we need in 50 years? (The M-discs are only around 100 Gbytes last I heard). 1000 years? What kind of data storage did they have in 1024? Printing wasn't even invented then.

Part of backup/archiving is Maintenance. That includes transferring your data to newer technology storage systems as they become available (and tested). It also includes verifying your data so it is not corrupted by the transfer.

If you follow a real backup strategy 2 copies local 1 off site and one cloud you are very well protected.
M-disks are great but the weak link is how long readers will be available, although they are plentiful now , but CD's DVD's & Blue-Ray are already 'legacy media' . If you go that route be sure you buy a few well made readers.
Virtually every type of physical storage has not aged well.
M-Disc, makes a lot of sense to me and the world could use a widely adopted standard like that, but last I checked none of the really big digital content creators use them, because they produce too much data.
That doesn't mean they don't work, they do the question is how long.

I would not even go there.
1. It was not a flat object. It is cubic.
2. Air density changes, hence your calculation is missing a correct data
3. You are not considering the center of pressure of the object.
4. You are not considering the Direction of wind
5. You are not considering the Direction of the ship relative to the wind
6. yadda yadda yadda etc.

I said (in my experience) wind is usually negligible at night and if that was the case, it would not a factor. Yes this is more true if the area is inland and you have even confirmed that it does happen especially inland, which I have shown in the map the place was inland.
I am not contesting the effect of wind but stating a common weather condition that can present in the incident. I did say the water current will play a bigger role compared to the wind. If you misread again, it does not mean the wind is not a factor. Only that it is to a lesser degree compared to the others. It may be a big factor? Possible. Only the investigation will really tell.We are just discussing possibilities. No need push our side of the story.

Thanks for the conversation and I'm sorry we just have to agree to disagree.

M-Discs are said to have a 1000 year life. They come in DVD and Blu Ray flavors. The largest Blu Ray discs are 100GB.

https://www.amazon.com/Verbatim-98913-M-Disc-100GB-Surface/dp/B011PIJPOC/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3F6CC165QQ0PH&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.O3j2um4BAReq-EfNSszSn7VC26UZesNBkuPFRrjvgCbGOpCdufoD8YYVaTxpMUZtZdvfcrCZnFcHEQNRqdM0Oi76UBvjWldQHXh4SW_UsZfgRNmj1PuQuy2esHI3VbsNBR9ooMN0QGZBTymSCnPCxc8t1PaixrHcZUsdkHxIZ9I.Dw1J_Ga9umzc91rMCNoNgAtMm0qNNpP5C0NNa4r4Ek0&dib_tag=se&keywords=m-disc%2B128gb&qid=1712321780&sprefix=m-disc%2Caps%2C147&sr=8-1&th=1

I believe that most current Blu Ray burners can burn them but not all. My LG external Blu Ray burner can burn them. They can usually be read by a standard external Blu Ray drive. Even so, having only one backup is not a good idea. (House may burn down, etc.)

Many people will buy at least 2 and preferrably 3 external drives and make multiple backups in case of drive failure. One should be kept offsite. Others will keep one copy of their files in the cloud and one or two on external drives. These drives can fail. I have friends who can attest to that. SSD drives may be more reliable than the spinning HDDs, but if one fails, it may be impossible to recover data from them. Not so with HDDs, but recovery can be very expensive. In any case, MULTIPLE backups is a really good idea to avoid that nightmare and expense.

If you buy an external drive, format it exFAT. exFAT drives can be written to and read by Macs and Windows machines.