Replace older HDD before failure?

[FlashEngineer]

In my current NAS, I have a few drives that I started out with 3-5 years ago, oldest ones being put in around 2010. I'm wondering should I scrap the ones that are older than 4 years before failure occurs? They aren't even NAS drives, just WD Green drives and some Seagate green ones. The newer ones I have are WD Red/Pro.

I'm running ZFS pools with Mirror vdev's.

No error from smart yet.

 

[Stereodude]

If you have a backup, can tolerate a bit of downtime, and haven't outgrown the amount of storage you have, why replace them before they fail? Do you have a spare on hand to swap in?

 

[FlashEngineer]

Well a couple drives are failing/failed in another Pool, I replaced 1 drive recently and will replace the other in the same mirror soon as well. So I got to looking at the total time power on from other drives and some of them are nearly the same time as the 2 that failed/failing. Plus they are old smaller HDD, 1.5TB and 2TB, not NAS drives, I was going to expand my space anyways to put in 4-6TB replacements...

I just don't want both failing in the same mirror then I lose a vdev = lose the whole pool. I don't have a backup of the larger pool which holds my media (shows, movies etc)

 

[Stereodude]

If it's a mishmash of drive models of different ages, one or two failures doesn't necessarily mean others will start to fail. If you had a large number of identical drives all of the same age and you were starting to get failures from them I'd be more concerned.

However, if you want to replace them to gain more space it may not be a bad idea.

 

[coolrunnings82]

I am in the same boat. 16x 2tb drives from 2011-2012. Samsung F4s here.