When to replace a HDD?

[ezekiel.incorrigible]

I'm administrating the server of a small charity running FreeNAS. short SMART testing indicates that one of the disks in a data mirror has some unreadable sectors: Device: /dev/ada2, 1406 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

I've seen a lot of folk opine that at this point, I should just swap it out with a replacement - but the system can withstand a drive failing and there is a spare on-hand. We are really trying to pinch the pennies on every expense so I'm inclined to get as much life out of our system as I can before throwing the disk away, is it imperative that I replace now? Is our data in peril?

 

[HoneyBadger]

I could write a long post about this, but the short version boils down to:

Forget the cost of a drive.

What is the data worth?

And the really short version is

"Should I replace the drive now?"

"Yes."

 

[danb35]

If you have a spare on hand, it's time to use it. That disk is well and truly on its way out.

 

[ezekiel.incorrigible]

Thanks all, am resilvering as I type, however: I've been warned that: "WARNING: The recovery key of your volume will be invalidated!" Not really clear what this means? I've posted here:

https://forums.freenas.org/index.ph...ill-be-invalidated-when-replacing-disk.70146/