I work somewhere that specialises in secondhand enterprise equipment and storage. The answer to your first question is "yes, but they really shouldn't". We're burning more hours than we can spare dealing with drive failures. Sure, we have RAID arrays capable of withstanding multiple failures, but we still find ourselves scrambling to replace drives faster than they're failing, even when they were tested before they were put in the spare pile.

Also, fuck Chia. It was supposed to be a low-power "proof of storage", but it's really "proof of prior work" and burns even more energy than proof of work since you need to constantly power the cryptographic calculations AND storage.