Welcome to a great conclusion. Key there is knowing what you need for what data and it sounds like you do.
For my data, I have kept them on individual drives with redundancy (copies and/plus pars) for some data and left some data by themself.
In the past, I have shift between individual drives and raid. These days, you have more options including object stores with cloud, rclone and minio.
These days for me, it’s between ability to move data around system fast, portability of data (fast) via ssd, and immediate data access. Life is short to spent it waiting for compute and processing cycle. Too many old guys RIP these days makes me reprioritize 😏
Box up the media and store it away if you got space. There’s are prob more worthless stuff in a box somewhere than media. Do whatever let you sleep better at night.