Making use of old drives

[DavieC]

Hi,

We have a bunch of 5 yr old 6TB drives (about 160ish of them) coming out of vendor support soon. We retire disks from service once the vendor support has expired.

I'm wondering if anyone has a strategy for using old drives? It seems wasteful not to use them for something, but I do expect we will start seeing them fail more regularly soon.
One thought was to create a pool with many spares and use it for something less important.

We want to avoid admin overhead as much as possible, once a drive fails we don't what to replace it with a new one, just have a spare tag in and use these until they fail.

I hate seeing useful things go to waste, but it might just not be worth a hassle - thoughts??

Thanks in advance,
dave

 

[Patrick M. Hausen]

Triple-mirrors? RAIDZ3? Something like that. Do a thorough burn-in, then check the SMART data, specifically unrecoverable errors and relocated sectors. Remove the drives that show these.