How often do you replace hard-drives in your system?

[nattan]

I have been tinkering around with freenas for a couple of years now and I tend to replace my drives when I see a lot of errors or prefail warnings. I am just kind of curious if I have been replacing too early or if it is in good practice to replace as soon as possible issues come up. I have lost all data before and I have vowed to never let it happen again. So yah, just like to know what you guys think on the whole drive replacement.

( I know it depends a lot on brand/size so the main goal here would to be to find out if people replace at first sign of prefail or if they hold off until there are performance issues. )

Edit:

Types of S.M.A.R.T errors that concern me would be:
-high raw read errors
-high spin up time
-reallocated sectors
-spin retry count
-min/max temperature

 

[nojohnny101]

what types of errors? wasn't passing smart tests (short? long?)?

my philosophy has always been that if it is within the RMA period for the drive, why not replace it? better to be proactive than reactive.

 

[BigDave]

what types of errors? wasn't passing smart tests (short? long?)?

my philosophy has always been that if it is within the RMA period for the drive, why not replace it? better to be proactive than reactive.

I agree with nojohnny101, but will take it a step further.

I have begun to expand my pool (by replacing with larger drives) since getting notice of a couple of errors on a single drive,
which has not repeated/increased since that day about 3 months ago. The drive had only 15K hours on it, but it's been
replaced with a new badblocks/SMART tested 4TB drive.
I too have suffered loss and vowed not to fall victim again...

 

[danb35]

I don't replace on time, but failing SMART tests will do it. Pending or offline/uncorrectable sectors will as well, though I'll tolerate small numbers of those if they don't appear to be increasing.

 

[joeschmuck]

@nattan Your drives are not the most recommended here because they tend to have more issues and you generally get what you pay for. But as for what matters when it comes to identifying what is or isn't an error for a hard drive, look at my tag line and it has the link to the troubleshooting guide. It gives you the data you are looking for.

EDIT: And since you asked in the title of this thread how often we replace our hard drives... Mine have not been replaced at all and they are all running over 3.5 years, some are longer, and they have been spinning most of that time with the heads loaded. No errors to date and I'm expecting them to last at least 1 more year but if they start failing anything, I'm going to buy a few replacements.

 

[snaptec]

If there is just a little hint that a drive is faulty I replace it.
But I use it for my Business.


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[nattan]

@nattan Your drives are not the most recommended here because they tend to have more issues and you generally get what you pay for. But as for what matters when it comes to identifying what is or isn't an error for a hard drive, look at my tag line and it has the link to the troubleshooting guide. It gives you the data you are looking for.

EDIT: And since you asked in the title of this thread how often we replace our hard drives... Mine have not been replaced at all and they are all running over 3.5 years, some are longer, and they have been spinning most of that time with the heads loaded. No errors to date and I'm expecting them to last at least 1 more year but if they start failing anything, I'm going to buy a few replacements.

Yah I switched form seagates to WD reds a while ago when my old server got stuck in a boot loop (old motherboard) and the drives hit around 50-60C killed them quickly. Now im running raid-z2 with (6) 3TB wd red's

 

[Mirfster]

Never, unless they have failures... HGSTs have been pretty sweet to me, so far so good. Besides, I plan on just having more JBODs. ;)

 

[SweetAndLow]

using 16 drives for 1-2 years and have replaced zero. I'll replace them when a smart test fails.