I have a ZFS RAIDZ2 array made of 6x 2TB disks with power on hours between 40,000 and 70,000. This is used just for data storage of photos and videos, not OS drives. Part of me is a bit concerned at those hours considering they’re a right old mix of desktop drives and old WD reds. I keep them on 24/7 so they’re not too stressed in terms of power cycles bit they have in the past been through a few RAID5 rebuilds.
Considering swapping to 2x ‘refurbed’ 12TB enterprise drives and running ZFS RAIDZ1. So even though they’d have a decent amount of hours on them, they’d be better quality drives and fewer disks means less change of any one failing (I have good backups).
The next time I have one of my current drives die I’m not feeling like staying with my current setup is worth it, so may as well change over now before it happens?
Also the 6x disks I have at the moment are really crammed in to my case in a hideous way, so from an aesthetic POV (not that I can actually seeing the solid case in a rack in the garage),it’ll be nicer.
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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.
- 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.
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.
According to my Synology:
- WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 - 86,272 hours
- WD40EFRX-68WT0N0 - 86,207 hours
- WD40EFRX-68N32N0 - 34,417 hours
- ST4000VN006-3CW104 - 10,054 hours
According to my Synology:
Where are you finding this data? It’s not Info Center -> Storage…
Look into the S.M.A.R.T. reports of each drive.
On Synology DSM 7.x: Storage Manager › HDD/SSD › Health Info › S.M.A.R.T. › S.M.A.R.T. Attribute › Details › Power_On_Hours
The power-on hours are shown directly on the Health Info page, no need to click through to the SMART attributes.
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 went all refurbished on my new drives. Time will tell. Oldest one has about 8 months runtime on it.
I went with 5x recertified Seagate exos 20tb, and one recertified ironwolf pro 20tb.
Nice, we’ll all look out for an update in a year!
I try to mix brands and lots (buy a few from one retailer and some from another). I used to work for a storage/NAS company and we had many incidents when we’d fill a 12 or 24 drive raid with drives right from the same order and had multiple drives die within hours of each other. Which isn’t usually enough for replacement/resilvering.
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.
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.
I mean if it’s homelab, it’s ok to be pets. Not everything has to be commoditized for the whims of industry.
“Cattle not pets” in this instance means you have a specific plan for the random death of a HDD (which RAIDZ2 basically already handles), and because of that you can work your HDDs until they are completely dead. If your NAS is a “pet” then your strategy is more along the lines of taking extra-good care of your system (e.g. rotating HDDs out when you think they’re getting too old, not putting too much stress on them) and praying that nothing unexpected happens. I’d argue it’s not really “okay” to have pets just because you’re in a homelab, as you don’t really have to put too much effort into changing your setup to be more cynical instead of optimistic, and it can even save you money since you don’t need to worry about keeping things fresh and new.
“In the old way of doing things, we treat our servers like pets, for example Bob the mail server. If Bob goes down, it’s all hands on deck. The CEO can’t get his email and it’s the end of the world. In the new way, servers are numbered, like cattle in a herd. For example, www001 to www100. When one server goes down, it’s taken out back, shot, and replaced on the line.”
~from https://cloudscaling.com/blog/cloud-computing/the-history-of-pets-vs-cattle/
Second hand so I’m sure ancient.
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.
$ 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 - 49499Once a year or so, I re-learn how to interpret Smart values, which I find frustratingly obtuse. Then I promptly forget .
So one’s almost 6 y/o and the other is about 5½?
Used HGST and Seagate all running about 50k hours
Ultimately it’s a matter of personal choice and risk tolerance.
The Z1 will be simpler and have larger capacity, but if you have a drive fail you’ll need to quickly get it replaced or risk having to rebuild/restore if the mirror drive follows the first one to the grave.
Your Z2 setup right now can have two drives fail and still be online, and having a wider spread of power-on hours is usually a good thing in terms of failure probability.
I manage a large (14,000±) number of on-site RAID1 arrays in various environments and there is definitely a trend for drives shipped at the same time to fail at roughly the same time. It’s common enough that we often intentionally swap drives out before shipping a new unit to the customer site.
On my homelab, I’m much more tolerant of risk since I have trust in my 3-2-1 backup solution and if my NAS goes down it’s not going to substantially affect anything while I wait for a drive replacement.
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.
I recently decommissioned my old poweredge T620. Beast of a thing, 5U heavy af. It had 8x10T drives and was the primary media server.
Now that it is replaced I bought 2x Synology RS822+ and filled them with the old disks. Using SHR2. They are mixed brands bought at different times so I’ve made sure each NAS has a mix of disks.
Lowest is 33k hours, highest is 83k.
