Cold spare disk burn in again

[pro lamer]

Hi,

I have a HDD I bought brand new and burnt in a year ago. I'm keeping it on a shelf in a closet (temperatures usually 25C/80F no higher than 35C/95F on hot days).

Do I need to burn it in again before putting into "production"?

Would a re-burn-in once a year a good and reasonable practice? Or going nuts/paranoid? ;-)

Or maybe just a burn in a month before warranty expiration if it happens that I don't need it for that long?

Do the same apply for recertified (black and white label) HDDs?

What about SSDs?

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[Chris Moore]

What about SSDs?

SSDs don't need a burn-in as they don't handle bad sectors / defects in the same way a mechanical disk does.

Would a re-burn-in once a year a good and reasonable practice? Or going nuts/paranoid? ;-)

You need to store your drives in airtight bag with a desiccant packet to protect them from environmental factors that could cause them to die in storage.

Even with these precautions, I have had drives fail after being in storage for a protracted time. I feel that a yearly test would be advisable, but you should not need to do a full burn-in. Perhaps just a single full write on all sectors followed by a read/verify, then a long SMART test. That should ensure the drive is still working without putting a lot of additional wear on the drive. Not putting a lot of wear on the drive is the whole reason for keeping it as a cold-spare instead of having it in the system and spinning as a hot-spare.

 

[horizonbrave]

SSDs don't need a burn-in

Hi Chris,
sorry to hijack the thread.. but I'm a bit lost in the FreeNAS "resources" section and I was wondering if SSD drives (for pools) don't require burn-in at all.
I think they'll become soon the standard and possibly this question will keep coming up I guess :) Thanks!

 

[Chris Moore]

I think they'll become soon the standard and possibly this question will keep coming up I guess :) Thanks!

For many applications, SSDs are already the standard. Enterprise grade SSDs have been in use for at-least six years. The early ones were small 100GB but with massive endurance and some of those are available as used parts now with enough endurance remaining that they might last another five years or more.
Enterprise SSDs are now available in sizes up to 15.36TB:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA6ZP8EM0392
It is just a matter of time before they become affordable for normal people.

In the realm of massive storage, it will still be a good long while before SSDs can be an economical option. Where I work, we have just ordered 86 of the 12TB spinning drives from Seagate, like this:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA9948RX2313
If you notice the price difference, the Exos drives are $356 each where the Nytro SSDs are $5763 each. That price adds up fast when you are buying 80 of them to store a massive database.

I'm a bit lost in the FreeNAS "resources" section and I was wondering if SSD drives (for pools) don't require burn-in at all.

SSDs have a lot of write capacity, but the number of writes to an SSD is the greater limit on SSD endurance, depending very much on what model SSD is being discussed. While it is likely a good idea to do some validation testing with a SSD pool to ensure everything is working properly before putting data on it, it would be a waste of the relatively limited write endurance to do a burn-in in the same way it is done with hard drives.

 

[pro lamer]

Hi Chris,
sorry to hijack the thread.. but I'm a bit lost in the FreeNAS "resources" section and I was wondering if SSD drives (for pools) don't require burn-in at all.
I think they'll become soon the standard and possibly this question will keep coming up I guess :) Thanks!

Last time I used h2testw. It's intended to detect fake/counterfeit SD cards though...

Edit: I ran it twice and it detected errors. Then I ran it twice more and the errors disappeared. Later on, after half a year, the drive started causing trouble. I haven't ruled out overheating issues yet, though...

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