Yeah, i assume you're like a lot of other people where you don't want everything you do to be tracked online. The service from Google is functional and all, by not trustworthy.
You can adjust this on your device (per device) or on your home modem/router/gateway, etc to cover all devices. Keeps Google, MS, Apple, ISP from tracking all online queries for all devices.
You can go one step further andd block all outgoing requests from all devices over port 53 and leave your router configured to do them all, then just configure you're DHCP settings to use your gateway (like 192.168.1.1) for both gateway and DNS
Dude yeah having a drive failure wreaks havoc. I had that happen a couple months ago (large drive failure) thankfully I had enough older smaller drives to temp replace it. I'm a bit over 200TB now, so Inconvenient for sure!