I have a SAMSUNG HD103UJ 1TB I’m about to retire, but not because it’s bad, only replaced with other bigger HDD’s. It’s a bit sad to be honest, these Samsungs is rock solid!

142578 hours (16 years)! 🤘

I tend to buy two at a time. Some are months old, others three years old.

Professionally, I have seen drives over 10 years always on at low utilization without issue. (The data was easily replaceable.)

crammed in to my case in a hideous way

Heat is a killer. Check them regularly.

I’m glad you asked because I’ve sort of been meaning to look into that.

I have 4 8TB drives that have ~64,000 hours (7.3 years) powered on.
I have 2 10TB drives that have ~51,000 hours (5.8 years) powered on.
I have 2 8TB drives that have ~16,800 hours (1.9 years) powered on.

Those 8 drives make up my ZFS pool. Eventually I want to ditch them all and create a new pool with fewer drives. I’m finding that 45TB is overkill, even when storing lots of media. The most data I’ve had is 20TB and it was a bit overwhelming to keep track of it all, even with the *arrs doing the work.

To rebuild it with 4 x 16TB drives, I’d have half as many drives, reducing power consumption. It’d cost about $1300. With double parity I’d have 27TB usable. That’s the downside to larger drives, having double parity costs more.

To rebuild it with 2 x 24TB drives, I’d have 1/4 as many drives, reducing power consumption even more. It’d cost about $960. I would only have single parity with that setup, and only 21TB usable.

Increasing to 3 x 24TB drives, the cost goes to $1437 with the only benefit being double parity. Increasing to 4*24TB gives double parity, 41TB, and costs almost $2k. That would be overkill.

Eventually I’ll have to decide which road to go down. I think I’d be comfortable with single parity, so 2 very large drives might be might be my next move, since my price per kWh is really high, around $.33.

Edit: one last option, and a really good one, is to keep the 10TB drives, ditch all of the 8TB drives, and add 2 more 10TB drives. That would only cost $400 and leave me with 4 x 10TB drives. Double parity would give me 17TB. I’ll have to keep an eye on things to make sure it doesn’t get full of junk, but I have a pretty good handle on that sort of thing now.

According to my Synology:

• WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 - 86,272 hours
• WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 - 86,207 hours
• WD40EFRX-68N32N0 - 34,417 hours
• ST4000VN006-3CW104 - 10,054 hours

• 2x18k - mirrored ZFS pool.
• 1x47k - 2.5" drive from an old laptop used for torrents, temp data, non-critical pod volumes, application logs etc.
• 1x32k - automated backups from ZFS pool. It’s kinda partial mirror of the main pool.
• 1x18k - (NVME) OS drive, cache volumes for pods.

Instead of single pool, I simply split my drives into tiers: cache, storage, and trash due to limited drive counts. Most R/W goes to the cheap trash and cache disks instead of relatively new and expensive NAS drives.

Mine are 3x 27k and 1x 47k. I just started replacing them… not because they’re old or have any issues, just because they’re becoming too small. Going from 4 to 8 tb disks and transferring the old ones to an external raid enclosure for backups.

Actually brings up a question I had… what do people think about refurbished drives for a NAS?

I just got done swapping all my drives out. I had 6x8tb drives in raidz2. About 8 months ago I had some sort of read errors on one drive with about 33k hours on it. I started swapping my drives out with 20tb drives one at a time, and just finished last week. So now I have 6x20tb drives with between 200 and 6k hours on them. The most hours on any of my older drives was about 40k, but other than a couple minor errors on the one drive, I’d had no issues with any of them. I’ve held onto all of the old drives, and was planning on setting up a second nas with 4x8tb drives in raidz1 to use as a backup server.

This was my second time replacing all my drives. My NAS is a bit like the ship of Theseus at this point, as it’s gone through many upgrades over the years. Started out with 6x3tb drives, and after about 4 years swapped the drives with 8tb units. About 5 years later (where we are now) it’s now 20tb drives. I’ve also swapped the chassis, mobo, CPU, and everything else out multiple times, etc.

My original setup was a mixture of desktop and Nas drives, but I’ve since been running all Nas/Enterprise drives. Based on my personal experience, it seems like I’ll replace drives every 4-5 years, regardless of actual failures… Both times I started the drive swaps there were read/write errors or sector failures on a drive in the pool. However, at around the same time I needed more space, so it was a convenient enough excuse to upgrade drive size.

As far as your concern about cramming drives into the chassis, always worth considering swapping chassis’s, but that’s up to you. I think 6 drives in Z2 is pretty happy compromise for number of drives and reliability. Thankfully your storage capacity is low enough you can pretty easily transfer everything off of that Nas to some interim storage location while you make whatever changes you want to.

Part of the reason I want to repurpose my old drives into another server is so I can have enough backup storage for critical files, etc should I need to start over with my main Nas.

3:2:1 - Cattle not pets - If your data is backed up in multiple sites, the death of one site shouldn’t overwhelm you, and give you time to recover.

If your primary site drives are getting above their designed lifetime, rotate them out, sure - but they could be used as part of the backup architecture else where (like a live offsite sync location with enough tolerance for 2 disk failures to account for the age).

3 copies of your data; 2 types of media; 1 copy offsite.

As someone who runs 3 large arrays with 8TB, 16TB, and 21TB drives respectively, know that:

• RAIDZ1 will cause tons of fear when a disk fails if you’re used to Z2. Don’t change.
• When a disk goes, the larger the disk, the slower the rebuild time, and the more taxing it is on the other disks. With Z1, if another fails during the rebiluild, you’re SOL.

Less disks is simpler, but more disks is safer. 6 disks is the perfect sized array IMO. If you don’t need more space, I’d buy a 2TB hot spare and call it a day. But if space is a concern, Z2 with 4 disks.

Edit: Those three arrays mirror each other in different locations, and the fear was still there when the Z1 had an issue. Mostly due to the headache, but still.

About 10k power on hours. That’s honestly a little surprising since I’ve had them for 7 years or so, but it’s only been on 24/7 for the last year or two (used to just turn on when watching a movie or something).

From those hours, I should expect a few more trouble free years.

My OS drive is >30k hours since it used to be my desktop boot drive (tiny 120GB SATA SSD). I’ve been thinking about upgrading to NVME, since my desktop NVME is getting a little full (500GB), and it could also make for a nice cache. It’s nowhere near dying though, with ~16TBW, so I’m in no hurry.

6 years old and running perfectly fine.

I have 5 WD RED disks in a RAIDZ1 config. In the first year I was experimenting with the sleep or spindown options. Then I have read that drives live longer if they run constantly. Now they are spinning 24/7.

The additional SSD has broken and been replaced 2x during these years.

Mine are only 25k hours or so, around 3 years. My prior set of disks had a single failure at 6 years but I replaced them all and went to bigger capacity. There is also the power saving aspect of going down to 2 drives as well, it definitely saves some power not spinning 4 extra drives all the time.

Second hand so I’m sure ancient.

$ for i in /dev/disk/by-id/ata-WD*; do sudo smartctl --all $i | grep Power_On_Hours; done
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   030   030   000    Old_age   Always       -       51534
  9 Power_On_Hours          0x0032   033   033   000    Old_age   Always       -       49499