[Anonamemouse]

I just put my NAS together about 6 months ago... I wish I had seen this first, I would have spent a little more on my drives.

http://www.popsci.com/these-are-hard-drives-most-likely-to-fail

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/how-long-do-disk-drives-last/

[rif]

Can some explain the popsci graph?

Example: if 1691 western digital drives failed in 2016, when were they put into service?  1 year ago, 4 years ago, 10 years ago?

Similarly If seagate had a massive improvement from 2015 to 2016, does that mean they improved their technology, lets say 4 years ago when they built the drives?

If that's true, a wd drive made today wouldn't show up on the chart.  And a Seagate made today isnt a reflection if what the chart shows.

[Odal3]

I'm running HGST Nas drives in my server. They come on sell every so often. I have the 4 TB drives.

If you search around there have been a lot of discussion about how to intetprete the Blackblaze report. The one argument is that most consumers at home don't run them in production environment in large pod system with many drives in each.
My server is is for example more or less idle most of the time since I mainly use it for audio and video in the evenings when I'm home.

As Blackblaze calls out in the report, the failure rate is like a bathtub with many failures in the beginning and then after 4 years or so. So if your drive works fine after a few months you probably will be OK. Don't forget to backup - running the drives in a raid is not the same as keeping a separate (preferably remote) backup.

[Odal3]

Rtf
See the 2nd link OP posted for more info. Here's an older report from 2015 showing a detailed summary of hardrives used: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015/

Note that most are consumergrade hardrives.

[rif]

Rtf
See the 2nd link OP posted for more info. Here's an older report from 2015 showing a detailed summary of hardrives used: https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-for-q2-2015/

Note that most are consumergrade hardrives.

I read that too, but im still confused.  I'm not looking to bash anything, I'm just not getting it.

It says they were purchasing external drives in enclosures,  removing the drives, and putting them into service.  Not sure these use the same drives as purchasing oem.  But obviously they know a lot more than us so it must be ok to do this.

I had a wd drive begin to fail in my tivo (pixelation, random restarts).  Since it was within wd's 3 year warranty, they sent me a replacement,  i copied the info over, and sent the defective one back.  All at no cost to me.

[ctviggen]

I've been running an unraid NAS for many years (at least 10).  I think in that time, I've had two drives (both WD green drives) fail (one at a time).  The second one I'm not sure I had to replace, but I wanted more storage.   I just shut down the server, replaced the drive, recalculated parity, and I was done. I also should mention that I did replace other drives, as I'm now using a 3TB parity drive, with two 1.5 TB drives and the rest are 2TB drives.  I've slowly been getting rid of the 1-1.5TB drives (in fact, when I get time,  I have a 2TB drive to replace one of the 1.5TB drives).  I currently have 7TB of storage, 3TB of parity, and 2TB of cache/hot spare. 

Currently, I'm running 6 disks, of which 4 are western digital green drives and two are seagate. 

I also have two 4 TB drives I use for backups.  These are both WD green drives.  I take one to work, and I run it daily to listen to music.  The other, I only run when performing a backup. 

[CanadianMaestro]

Ctviggen:  what is a "parity" drive?

I use G-Drive and La Cie Porsche Design desktop drives. No issues yet.

[Anonamemouse]

Example: if 1691 western digital drives failed in 2016, when were they put into service?  1 year ago, 4 years ago, 10 years ago?

Similarly If seagate had a massive improvement from 2015 to 2016, does that mean they improved their technology, lets say 4 years ago when they built the drives?

If that's true, a wd drive made today wouldn't show up on the chart.  And a Seagate made today isnt a reflection if what the chart shows.

Backblaze started 5 years ago, so the drives they use are all max 5 years old. They offer cheap cloudstorage, and use cheap disks to store the data on. They don't go for expensive hardware, and as such have a pretty good insight on the life and death of consumer grade hard disks under less than ideal circumstances. Google uses the best of the best and in immense quantities. Backblaze doesn't, they even buy their disks through employees going shopping. They use the disks most people would buy for their home storage.

[jpm]

Good discussion.

1 - "Backblaze started 5 years ago" per the article published in November 2013

2 - Backblaze only use consumer grade drives - but we've been here before in an older thread.

3 - I highly doubt that anyone's home NAS experiences the 24x7 workload that Backblaze drives do. Our odds of failure should improve after the initial failure prone period.

4 - Golden rules: Back it up regularly, check drive health regularly, you can never have too much redundancy.

If you don't want to just replace all of your drives at a certain point, say around 4 years, there's a lot to be said for periodically testing each drive with something like Crystal Disk utilities.




 

[jpm]

Ctviggen:  what is a "parity" drive?

Also curious how you have a parity drive in an "unraid" NAS? Is it just a terminology thing?

[JDUBS]

A home raid system is not a substitute for backblaze (and vice a versa).  I have both.

-Jim

[Krutsch]

I worked in the storage industry for much of my career. It's very difficult to predict HDD reliability, based on previous history.

Don't over think this and don't worry so much about HDD "quality". Home use is nothing like enterprise use, where the drives are spun-up and the heads are thrashing 24/7 with things like databases, all packed into enclosures with many other drives. Co-location of spinning rust has heat and vibration implications that just don't exist in home use.

Don't be afraid to buy less expensive drives from reputable manufactures, which is easy - there are only 2 parent companies left: WD and Seagate. I just finished this weekend adding storage to my Drobo and went with cheap, 3TB WD Blue Desktop drives. They will last for years, trust me.

You are far more likely to loose data from human error and/or software error on your RAID / NAS box. So, make sure you keep at least one additional copy of your audio files, which is frequently updated, on another device. HDDs are cheap, so why not keep 2 copies of your precious music - preferably one in the cloud or off-site.

[Odal3]

Speaking of cheap external backup drives, I picked up a Seagate 4tb with enclosure for $59 at target today. That's $15 per TB.    I will use it as a second backup drive at a remote location.

See here: http://slickdeals.net/f/8764159-4tb-seagate-usb-3-0-external-hard-drive-54-98-at-target-ymmv

The details to check if your store has it in inventory
DPCI - 056-02-0117
Search on http://brickseek.com/target-inventory-checker

It still scanned for full price in my store but the bricks site showed $59 so I just showed the website and the cashier changed the price manually with no questions asked.

[sfraser]

It's not a queston of "if" , but rather "when". Backup, backup, backup and store your backups offsite at work or a friends house etc.

[Anonamemouse]

It's not a queston of "if" , but rather "when". Backup, backup, backup and store your backups offsite at work or a friends house etc.

Indeed. Every hd will die.

[Marius]

Hi,
maybe you know already, but just to be sure i thought it might be helpful to share what i just learned...


Using a Synology NAS 5* 4 tb drives, my Nas was out of hard disk space. No matter what i deleted, it just kept using extra space. Up to not being able to reach the NAS anymore. Do have an extensive library, but this would not come close to 20TB.


It appears that Cloudstation server, which was running bot not used, keeps several versions of all files in the cloud, but also writes these on the NAS itself. Couldn't believe, but the fora seem pretty clear.


Uninstalled CloudStation server, and after a night of resetting and deleting, i now have a free 10tb again!


So Synology users, just check to be sure. One can set the backup number to 0 apparently, after Synology's users complained heavily. Not for me, i'll stay clear of it for now, rebuilding my Plex db's (which i deleted to regain space...)


Cheers,
Marius

[Anonamemouse]

Hmm... Didn't know that. I have a Synology as well with the cloud server on, but not in use...

[Marius]

only one way to find out... uninstall and see.

Still, Harddisk space - management is confusing. In my Finder I've got a whole extra TB of free space compared to the Synology DSM. Coming from a full NAS, i don't complain, but it makes one wonder.

 

 

Where my other 5,7 Tb have gone... I take it the 5 disc configuration doesn't have a redundancy of about 20%? Might well be the case.

Cheers,
Marius