Lifetime WD red

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elag

Member
Dec 1, 2018
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I have a file server with 6 WD red 3 TB that are around 5 years old. I have not had any problems, running them in RAID-Z2 (ZFS scrub does not find any errors ever). I am now wondering how much more life I can get out of them. Should I replace them or wait for problems to show up (I still have a spare, so I can replace a failed disk).
Is there information on the failure rate after > 5 years?
I am planning to replace them by SSDs in the longer run anyhow
 

Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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While drives do die early and die late and yours are getting now towards late I think since you have a spare you can afford to wait until you go all ssd.
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
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I too have lots of drives still in active service after the 5yr mark, the oldest being some 3TB greens and reds in an old RAID array; I don't generally cycle stuff out at home unless I need to - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Of course, it depends a lot on what your future plans for the array might be, whether you need more space, or are able to add more spindles, or want the same space on fewer spindles, or any one of a hundred other reasons.

There's not really any way of knowing how much life is left in any particular drive; sometimes you'll start getting SMART errors or ominous grinding or clicking noises, sometimes the drive will just suddenly drop dead with no warning at all (and bathtub curves being what they are this can happen to both old and new drives alike).

If you want to make sure you're better prepared for drive failures when they do crop up here's some points to consider:
  • Make sure SMART monitoring and regular self-tests are run, as well as ZFS scrubs. Not a guarantee of detecting anything but gives you a better chance of detecting something
  • Semi-regular performance checks; some drives that are failing do so in such a way that they start performing poorly before reporting any errors, so if your RAID array slows down it might just be a particular drive that's causing it. One easy way to do this is to monitor the discs in iostat or similar during activities like a scrub or a RAID rebuild to see if any one disc is noticeably busier than the others.
  • Better backups, especially if you've already got a budget for hardware replacement. Personally I run a backup server at home which mirrors my primary server as well as offsite copies. Generally speaking I would advise people to spend their money on backups first and RAID second.
  • Have a long hard think about your drive topology - if you can afford extra drives, consider switching to using mirrors (ZFS' RAID10 equivalent) instead of RAIDZ2, or reducing the amount of drives in each RAIDZ2 vdev (depends on what you have already of course).
  • Keep a spare drive home so you can replace any failed or failing drives immediately, minimising the amount of time the array is in a degraded state.
 
Last edited:

elag

Member
Dec 1, 2018
79
14
8
If you want to make sure you're better prepared for drive failures when they do crop up here's some points to consider:
  • Make sure SMART monitoring and regular self-tests are run, as well as ZFS scrubs. Not a guarantee of detecting anything but gives you a better chance of detecting something
  • Semi-regular performance checks; some drives that are failing do so in such a way that they start performing poorly before reporting any errors, so if your RAID array slows down it might just be a particular drive that's causing it. One easy way to do this is to monitor the discs in iostat or similar during activities like a scrub or a RAID rebuild to see if any one disc is noticeably busier than the others.
  • Better backups, especially if you've already got a budget for hardware replacement. Personally I run a backup server at home which mirrors my primary server as well as offsite copies. Generally speaking I would advise people to spend their money on backups first and RAID second.
  • Have a long hard think about your drive topology - if you can afford extra drives, consider switching to using mirrors (ZFS' RAID10 equivalent) instead of RAIDZ2, or reducing the amount of drives in each RAIDZ2 vdev (depends on what you have already of course).
  • Keep a spare drive home so you can replace any failed or failing drives immediately, minimising the amount of time the array is in a degraded state.
Thanks for the input. Most of this is already in place. Smart monitoring, scrubs. I have backups from the important data: media files, user data etc. There is some data like Linux ISOs and some mirrors that are not worth the trouble.
Re. drive topology: when I replace disks (that will be partly SSD, partly spinning rust) I was planning to change my RAIDZ2 to mirrors, thanks for the confirmation on that front
@Evan: I do realize that I am getting to the end of life, hence the question. I was just wondering how urgent replacement is. I would like to replace the server first and replace disks later. For now this sounds feasable
 

EffrafaxOfWug

Radioactive Member
Feb 12, 2015
1,394
511
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For what it's worth, if I were using an all-SSD array I'd probably stick with RAID6/RAIDZ2 rather than going mirrors/RAID10; the main advantage of RAID10 is that rebuilds are much faster (sequential copy from one drive to another rather than heavy read-modify-write across the whole array), this is much less of an issue for SSDs which have little penalty for random access. You're just likely to be CPU-limited on the rebuild rather than IO-limited.

RAID6 with SSDs gets you a lot more space for your money than RAID10 would and SSDs should also have a far lower failure rate so the amount of times you'll be rebuilding should be much less.

However I've not experimented or read much about RAID arrays with big flash drives though; ~4TB SSDs are only just becoming affordable and are still twice the price of a 10TB HDD so they're not an option for me yet.
 

nasomi

Member
Jan 11, 2016
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I have 14x4tb toshiba hdd's in 2 hardware raid5 array's and they're almost 5 years old. Unfortunately with my setup it's impossible to see the SMART data that i'm aware of though. No failures, but I'm really considering jumping to 8gb preemptively. I'm fine on space, but all it takes is to lose 2 and i'm in trouble. I could go raid6 with 8gb drives too...