I had an old chest freezer from the 80s. You had to manually defrost it for it to keep working. Modern ones have automatic defrosters and other such features.

I had an old chest freezer from the 80s. You had to manually defrost it for it to keep working. Modern ones have automatic defrosters and other such features. Yes, the old one "kept working", but at worse-and-worse reliability as the frost built up, until you manually removed everything from the freezer and ran a proper defrost cycle (aka: turn it off, wait for everything to melt, sponge out the water). I think I'll stick with my "less reliable" heater-inside-a-freezer with an escape hole to automatically siphon + pump the water out. More moving parts means less reliability, but these features are absolutely worth the loss in reliability.