Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[JimH]

In another thread, this topic came up and I found this article:

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

"...  about 90% of the drives we own have lasted four years and 65% are living longer than six years."

JRiver uses Backblaze for some of our servers.

[Captor]

In another thread, this topic came up and I found this article:

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

"...  about 90% of the drives we own have lasted four years and 65% are living longer than six years."

JRiver uses Backblaze for some of our servers.

Wow! That sounds not so good. I was thinking at least 10 years is normal. And as far as I have hear from people in the hard drive branch the SSD's are even less reliable. They can save data from 3 out of 10 whiles it is possible to save data from 9 out of 10 in mechanical disk.

[Hendrik]

Backblaze is nowhere near normal harddrive use. They use desktop drives at high density in 24/7 load. In a normal PC at home, they'll last quite a bit longer.

[Manfred]

I was thinking at least 10 years is normal.

I have some Samsung EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB , 5400rpm, 8,9ms, 32MB Cache, SATA2Gb/s: there are ~13 years old and I use them for Disaster Recovery purpose. The Lifetime much depends on the workload (e.g video surveillance is totally different from our video archives in MC), temperatures, utilization...

[jmone]

FWIW, I've had pertty good luck with long drive lifetime when used for media server.  They typically get very low writes as the media tends to sit there untouched. 

Unfortunately, I've found certain model drives have a higher tendency to fail and they seem to fail about the same time.  The last example of this is the 8TB Seagate Archive HDD which I've just removed the last of from my pool.  These ones fail without warning with the partition all of a sudden being marked as RAW.  The first time it happened I repartition / format but a couple of days later the same thing happened.  A month later the next one went RAW as well.  So - out they all came.

I've also done a couple of other things:
- Monitoring: I also highly recommend Hard Disk Sentinel.  Lets you keep a track of the bad sectors occuring and being remapped so you can pick when to retire a drive
- Backup: Don't raid, Do Backups.  I've had a raid controller and windows chkdsk fight at one point.  Scrambled the entire raid array.  Never again. 
- Format: Not for everyone (and not available in most versions of Windows), but I use ReFS with integrity streams turned on (eg format g: /fs:refs /i:enable /q /A:64K).  Rumors are ReFS will be coming to more versions of Windows.

[goatherder]

...or just use a NAS with drives intended for RAID.

They'll run more often than not for a decade - longer if they're just used as occasional backup drives.

[eve]

...or just use a NAS with drives intended for RAID.

They'll run more often than not for a decade - longer if they're just used as occasional backup drives.

IIRC JMone uses a Windows Server type deployment for his storage needs (correct me if i'm wrong) it's not just a bunch of drives plugged into a desktop.

Back when I used windows for storage, it was a bunch of drives plugged into a system. A complete PITA. DrivePool helped.
Honestly once I realized I needed to sort out an alternative, I just decided to dive into linux more seriously.

[eve]

FWIW, I've had pertty good luck with long drive lifetime when used for media server.  They typically get very low writes as the media tends to sit there untouched. 

Unfortunately, I've found certain model drives have a higher tendency to fail and they seem to fail about the same time.  The last example of this is the 8TB Seagate Archive HDD which I've just removed the last of from my pool.  These ones fail without warning with the partition all of a sudden being marked as RAW.  The first time it happened I repartition / format but a couple of days later the same thing happened.  A month later the next one went RAW as well.  So - out they all came.

I've also done a couple of other things:
- Monitoring: I also highly recommend Hard Disk Sentinel.  Lets you keep a track of the bad sectors occuring and being remapped so you can pick when to retire a drive
- Backup: Don't raid, Do Backups.  I've had a raid controller and windows chkdsk fight at one point.  Scrambled the entire raid array.  Never again. 
- Format: Not for everyone (and not available in most versions of Windows), but I use ReFS with integrity streams turned on (eg format g: /fs:refs /i:enable /q /A:64K).  Rumors are ReFS will be coming to more versions of Windows.

I wont speak to the intricacies of managing storage on Windows (not really my thing). but 100% don't do RAID.
Of course, you can do RAID like things, or you can do software RAID, (or be smarter and use ZFS) but never ever ever use a RAID controller. You do not need one in 2023 for any home deployment. They're a massive liability and essentially pointless.

[S. Pupp]

I wont speak to the intricacies of managing storage on Windows (not really my thing). but 100% don't do RAID.
Of course, you can do RAID like things, or you can do software RAID, (or be smarter and use ZFS) but never ever ever use a RAID controller. You do not need one in 2023 for any home deployment. They're a massive liability and essentially pointless.

My experience fits perfectly with your advice.  I had a RAID-5 LG-NAS lose a drive, then during the resilver process, lose a second drive - a catastrophic loss of all data.  I went to my backup drive, a hardware RAID5 box.  The drives were good, but the box was dead - so much for having a backup.

I now use a TrueNAS server with RAID 1 (mirrored drives) and zfs file system.  I back this up periodically to a second TrueNAS server.

[jmone]

IIRC JMone uses a Windows Server type deployment for his storage needs (correct me if i'm wrong) it's not just a bunch of drives plugged into a desktop.

I did a clean build of my Backup and Main PC earlier this year, so few things changed (but the basic concept remained).

OS: MS has slowly got rid of the lower cost "home" versions of Windows Servers over the years (I stared with Windows Home Server way back when).  So my builds are now just around Windows 11.  Until MS reintroduces the ability to format ReFS partitions in "normal" Windows (rumor is that is coming), I'm running Windows for Workstations on both my Main PC and the Backup Server.  All my data drives are formatted as ReFS. 

Drive Controller: I also replaced my SAS --> SATA controller as it was a bit of a janky setup and my expander died.  I've purchased a 9305-24I for the Backup Server and a 9400-8i for my Main PC and both were pre-flashed in "IT Mode" so they just appear as HBA. 

Drives:  I tend to roll down my drives from my Main PC (that has 8 Bays) to my Backup server (20 Bays rack mounted cheapie case).  When I need to expand my capacity, I'll buy and swap in larger drives on the Main PC 8-Bays and that drive gets rolled down into the Backup server.  That said I did just retire all my older sub 10TB drives.  I was getting issues on the 8TB "Seagate Archive" drives going "RAW" in the backup server... So time they went. I've stipped them down and they will be melted into something in my metal casting setup!

Pooling SW: DrivePool for Windows.  Love it.

Monitoring SW: Hard Disk Sentinel.  Love it.

Sync SW:  I use Free File Sync to manually push changes from my Main PC drivepool to the Backup server drivepool.  Love it.  It scans both pools and give you preview the difference between them so you can see what you are about to commit.  I've had times where I've inadvertently deleted stuff on my Main PC and used Free File Sync to "bring to back".

Backup SW for Client PC:  Went with Veeam to replace the Windows Server Backup for the OS HDD backups of the various PC (not for the Media Pool stuff).  Seems to work well, giving both bare metal and incremental file backup/restore capabilities.  It is free for home use.  Have only used the File Restore (worked fine) not a bare metal restore (yet), touch wood).

[random_123]

I have some Samsung EcoGreen F4 HD204UI 2TB , 5400rpm, 8,9ms, 32MB Cache, SATA2Gb/s: there are ~13 years old and I use them for Disaster Recovery purpose. The Lifetime much depends on the workload (e.g video surveillance is totally different from our video archives in MC), temperatures, utilization...

Can't stress enough this point especially for those living in hot weather areas with no air conditioning, seen many cases of drives (especially external ones having one of those 3.5" large capacity CMR drives inside) continuously running at 60C+ temp even when practically doing nothing. Running HDDs at 60C+ temps for long durations often is a sure shot way to reduce their life span to 2-3 years.