Disk failure - What's your mileage?

[otpi]

I've seen the statistics, but it is hard to relate to the 1 % - 2 %. A failed disk is such a binary experience. What are your personal experiences?

I've had 2 disks fail in my tiny (4-disk) NAS the past 2 years. The first failed at ~11000 power on hours, most likely due to a power outage. The replacement I bought while waiting for RMA gave out just now, after ~2000 h (failing long SMART; Read error, bad sector). So the spare disk (from the previous RMA) replaced it, and a new is on it's way.

Just goes to show how useful a spare disk an be. And how valuable raidz2 is for those who value the things we store. I also keep an offline backup (external disk).

 

[winnielinnie]

I don't have raw numbers or stats, but I will say that nearly every drive that has failed me died within months. The rest live long enough that I replace them before they have a chance to fail. ("Replace" really means upgrade, as larger capacities become more affordable.)

This seems to follow the general trend that "...if your drive surives the one-year mark, it's probably a good drive that will give you several more years of operation."

 

[Samuel Tai]

My original pool of 4x WD Red WD20EFRXs came online in 2015. At about the 3-year point, I lost one, which threw errors during scrubs. That's the only drive I've lost to date, not including boot pool thumb drives.

 

[sretalla]

Of about 50 disks I have lost one to DoA and then 15 or so to "old age" which seems to start about 4 years in (35K hours spinning). I have a bunch of disks at about 37K and a few at 50+

 

[garm]

I second @sretalla , although my unit count is not as high

 

[subhuman]

The most spectacular failure I ever had was my first HD, in a PS/2 Model 30. It started squealing and throwing errors, shortly it was a horrendous screeching and then... silence.
Took the cover off the drive, the heads had impacted the platters and worn grooves into them.
They always say your first time is the most memorable....
Since then, I've had very few die while in-service. If they make it past the first week of use, they're usually still working fine when they get proactively replaced after about four years. With a few notable exceptions- my FreeNAS boot pool is a pair of ancient 40GB 2.5" drives, and I have one WD Green 2TB drive that, at this point, I want to see how long it will last. Right now it's at over 70k power-on hours and load/unload count of over 1.4 million.

 

[Jailer]

1 infant mortality on my desktop (WD 1TB black) that died within a couple months and one Seagate 1TB with the bad firmware bug. Only one on my FreeNAS box but it was my fault. I bumped the data cable while cleaning it causing it to disconnect. When I figured out what was wrong and got it re connected it died within 2 days. Other than that the rest of the drives (all WD greens 3TB) were replaced at the 4 1/2 year mark to upgrade available space but were otherwise going strong. They're sitting unused on my desk as we speak.