I’ve been using Loki and promtail for containers I actually care about aggregating logs for. It’s something relatively new for me but so far the experience has been positive.

I’ve had SSDs go bad. So if it’s something you really care about I’d approach it the same as hard disks.

I would second this. A normal tower with a high quality psu and 5 drives is what I use for cheap storage. Obviously more failure prone than true enterprise hardware but a hell of a lot cheaper.