If you are pitch black in this, then consider mining. If you have expensive electricity, then buying equipment for mining the CHIA coin will give you a profit of more than 10 per year. And a small farm will not bother you with noise and require maintenance.
I don't think this is good advice for OP, though. Spending money to buying HDDs in order to mine very few CHIA coins as reward does not make sense at all. Worse still, as far as I remember, the storage disk drives get messed up in the long run. OP will have nowhere to sell them off, except maybe as scrap.
I would rather advise OP is buy coins he feels bullish about with that money, transfer them to a hardware wallet and wait for the bull run in order to cash out some profits.
CHIA mining does not damage hard drives. The largest load on the hard disk is only during the hard disk preparation procedure, which is called plotting. The process requires minimal activity from hard drives, so power consumption is minimal. This is not the same load solver in which video cards work.