Does hard drive's health affect integrity of internet traffic?

[abij]

Hello,

I was wondering besides providing OS, saving configurations and logging what else does a storage device do in OPNsense. More importantly, does a hard drive's health affect the integrity of data packets passing through OPNsense? Or the data filtering happens in RAM so hard drive is not relevant?

I ask this question since I am new to OPNsense and at this stage I am playing with a retiring hard drive which SMART plugin reports it is failing. But the whole OPNsense set up has been running for days and my use of internet seems fine.

Many thanks in advance.