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.
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.