How long do you keep your NAS drives?

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Handle9

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#303749 7-Mar-2023 08:46

I've got a WD Red and a Seagate Ironwolf drive that are both over 7 years old in my Unraid server. They aren't particularly big (3TB) so replacing them won't be a big deal but I don't see the point in replacing drives that still have reasonable amounts of useful life in them. I'm curious what sort of life others are seeing out of their drives.

They are both CMR drives for what that's worth.

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#3046631 7-Mar-2023 08:50

Kinda related... Backblaze and some other cloud storage providers publish statistics about drive failures. Here is one example. Hard Drive Failure Rates for Q1 2021 (backblaze.com)

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Silvrav

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#3046635 7-Mar-2023 09:05

Unraided being the focus here - by the time the drive fails it could be too late, so yes with an unraided server, and depending on how often you use the drives I would say every 3-5 years.

raided, I leave mine until I get a failure notice. I did recently upgrade but a mate of mine has run an HDD for 10 years until it failed, and also raided.

Maybe get another set and go raided, so you can get every last bit of life out of them.

Dynamic:

Kinda related... Backblaze and some other cloud storage providers publish statistics about drive failures. Here is one example. Hard Drive Failure Rates for Q1 2021 (backblaze.com)

An interesting trend noticed that the bigger the drive the quicker it fails.

coffeebaron

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#3046638 7-Mar-2023 09:10

For business I typically suggest 5 years. But as long as it's not mission critical and you have redundancy, then you can just replace them as they fail, just hopefully you don't get multiple drive failures at once. Though if you also have an online backup, then that would mitigate a sudden total failure. It comes down to how much time you want to spend on the restore process too, i.e. although you may have an online backup, that can take a lot of time to restore. And I'm sure there will be people out there too with 10yr old NAS still on their original drives running fine :)

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Handle9

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#3046639 7-Mar-2023 09:10

It’s an Unraid array with a single parity drive.

Handle9

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#3046641 7-Mar-2023 09:11

coffeebaron:
For business I typically suggest 5 years. But as long as it's not mission critical and you have redundancy, then you can just replace them as they fail, just hopefully you don't get multiple drive failures at once. Though if you also have an online backup, then that would mitigate a sudden total failure. It comes down to how much time you want to spend on the restore process too, i.e. although you may have an online backup, that can take a lot of time to restore. And I'm sure there will be people out there too with 10yr old NAS still on their original drives running fine :)

Anything critical is backed up to backblaze.

freitasm

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#3046645 7-Mar-2023 09:20

Silvrav:

Unraided being the focus here

Unraid is the name of a Linux-based OS that operates like a NAS. It supports RAID. I don't think Handle9 said the drives were "unraided"

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danielparker

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#3046647 7-Mar-2023 09:25

Unraided and parity protected.. Until it dies, or I need the slot for a newer larger drive.. I am using dual parity though, so can afford to lose two drives before there is an issue.. and important data is backed up elsewhere.

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#3046655 7-Mar-2023 09:31

Here's the oldest drive in my BTRFS RAID 1:

9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 080 080 000 Old_age Always - 103397

That's 11.8 years powered on. Been waiting for it to die since about 2017. I don't see the need to replace it before it fails as replacing a drive in RAID1 is straightforward and safe and ZFS/BTRFS protect against silent data corruption.

That said, at 1.5TB it's hardly worth the power of keeping it spun up so it's going to get retired before long.

Silvrav

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#3046656 7-Mar-2023 09:32

freitasm:

Silvrav:

Unraided being the focus here

Unraid is the name of a Linux-based OS that operates like a NAS. It supports RAID. I don't think Handle9 said the drives were "unraided"

aaa if that is the case then yes ignore my post 😂

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#3046730 7-Mar-2023 10:44

I run 7 x Synology NAS units of various vintages, all running RAID 5 or Synology Hybrid RAID, and loaded with Western Digital Red or Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives, 8TB or larger.

Altogether about 50 x NAS HDDs.

Over the last 10 years I have had only hard drive failure - a 10TB Seagate Ironwolf, about 3 years old.

After replacing the Seagate with an identical spare, no data loss from the RAID array.

No failures of WD NAS drives, ever.

For SOHO use I am happy to keep HDDs for more than 5 years.

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#3046764 7-Mar-2023 11:46

I'm using shucked 8tb WD "White Label" drives in my UnRaid server and they're going strong after 4 years with no signs of failure.

I also backup to Crashplan (unlimited cheap backup) so not bothered if the whole array fails... it'll just be more annoying. As each drive is actually a different batch I don't imagine I'll ever have 2 failures at the same time.

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#3046769 7-Mar-2023 12:02

Me, i pull them when they die. Around 7 years I guess. I had some 2-4TB drives die. Upgraded to 8TB. I lost a drives worth of stuff, but its not mission critical stuff and I didnt care, also using unRAID.

The drives that died where WD red/black drives. I had similar aged green ones, that havent died yet. So now I just buy the cheap green drives and be done with it. Nothing on my unRAID box is super important, and aslong as only one drives dies at a time, im fine. Before I wasnt keeping a close eye on it, and well it was my fault.

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#3047009 7-Mar-2023 20:15

My 4TB HGST drives are 8 years old and still working fine. They're a ReFS mirror pair, so if one fails hopefully the other will last a little longer. Data is backed up to hard drive regularly, and online daily. 8 years is probably really pushing it, even for drives that have a great reputation. BackBlaze says their annual failure rate is around 0.7%, average age around 6 years, 500 failed out of 13,000... maybe I'll keep them a bit longer.

When these fail or I get nervous about the I'll probably replace them with a single Samsung 2TB NVME drive. Prices are pretty good these days. It would be nice to get rid of spinning disks entirely, but it's not quite economic yet to replace a 6TB drive with SSD.

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#3047153 8-Mar-2023 01:19

I have a Hitachi Deskstar HDS723030ALA640 3 Tbyte drive that used to be in my MythTV box running 24/7, then when it was replaced got moved to my mother's MythTV box running 24/7. It is currently showing 99412 power on hours (about 11.3 years) and is working fine. And I used to have an ancient IBM 10,000 rpm SCSI drive in my OS/2 box that reached over 12 years running 24/7 before the motherboard died and I moved the OS/2 machine to a VM. It would probably still work if I tried it. But it is only 8 Gbytes. On my Windows box I have a WDC WD30EZRX (3 Tbyte Green) drive that has been used for archival storage only but has been on 24/7 for 10 years 287 days now.

It is clearly possible to build drives that last a long time, but as far as I know longevity is not what most drives are built for. I now have several enterprise class huge Seagate and WD drives which all have 5 year warranties, but they have not been around long enough to know if they are going to last well yet. But based on the HDS723030ALA640 having been an enterprise class drive in its day and having a 5 year warranty also, I have hopes that enterprise class drives may well have a good long life.

Tinkerisk

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#3047156 8-Mar-2023 03:38

Handle9:

I've got a WD Red and a Seagate Ironwolf drive that are both over 7 years old in my Unraid server. They aren't particularly big (3TB) so replacing them won't be a big deal but I don't see the point in replacing drives that still have reasonable amounts of useful life in them. I'm curious what sort of life others are seeing out of their drives.

They are both CMR drives for what that's worth.

Until the things die. However, I have a ZFS-Z2 pool, so up to 2 drives can die at the same time (but no more). I have one 4GB WD red (now plus) drive in the pool that is supposed to be dead and the replacement is already here. But it keeps going without a care in the world. Of course, there are still 2 backups of the data.

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