How often do you replace drives in your servers ?

[Jasse Jansson]

I have WD Red's in my servers.
I begun replacing disks one by one in may 2017 because they was 3-4 year old.
Is it wise to replace'em every 3 years or do they last longer ?
Do you wait until the disk is failing until you replace them ?
I replaced a disk every or every other month, but I might be a little paranoid.
I have a main server and one that acts as a backup server for the first one so I'm not especially worried.
I'm mostly interested in hearing about your strategies.

 

[danb35]

Do you wait until the disk is failing until you replace them ?

Pretty much, though "failing" for me means I'm starting to see SMART errors--bad sectors (generally into the double digits--3-5 bad sectors don't trigger immediate replacement for me), failed tests, etc. I don't wait for a hard failure, but I also don't see any particular need to proactively replace disks.

 

[Redcoat]

Pretty much, though "failing" for me means I'm starting to see SMART errors--bad sectors (generally into the double digits--3-5 bad sectors don't trigger immediate replacement for me), failed tests, etc. I don't wait for a hard failure, but I also don't see any particular need to proactively replace disks.

Ditto here. I have a couple of new drives on the shelf pretested - smartdrv, badblocks, then smartdrv again - and will put one into service as a replacement when I see bad sectors start to ramp up on an in-service drive.