When to replace an aging HDD?

[durin]

Some of my oldest NAS HDDs currently in use (Seagate ST3000VN000's, from before they got the IronWolf brand name) have been in continuous use for over 5 years. Thus far they've served very well, but given HDD failure rates tend to exhibit a u-shape, with failure rates starting to rise around 5 years, I'm considering replacing them pre-emptively them with some newer drives. At what point would you start replacing HDDs as a precautionary measure?

 

[Rusty]

Any bed sectors reported on it? It's true that all drives fail, just a matter of time, but for me, I always have a hot or cold spare drive and replace it as soon as it fails or DSM is alerting that it will fail. This should be even more true with the upcoming DSM7 and what Syno has in store.

So all in all, I just wait until it fails. I have some drives in x11 models that are still running fine, then again had some WD RED die in the 1st 24h.

 

[Tedster]

A while ago, I posted about one of my 3TB WD Red's that had failed in my NAS. If I remember correctly, DSM reported it as failed and it sounded pretty rough. It wouldn't complete the quick smart test in WD's data lifeguard software.

I was going to take it out and shoot it, for the cheek. However, I relented and put it in an e-sata caddy attached to my desktop. It's still going! I have orientated the drive horizontally though! It's as quiet as a mouse and the WD test completes normally and it shows up as healthy in that software.

Go figure? I really do think that placing a drive horizontally is better for the drive bearings!

The trouble with letting them fail is the stress on the remaining drives when the raid rebuilds. No worse than data scrubbing though, I suppose.

 

[durin]

Thank you for the perspectives - I may replace some of the old Seagates to reduce the risk of correlated failures, maybe even re-use some of them after I start to have actual drive failures...

My drives are currently a mix of the 5y+ old Seagate 3TB drives, some 2-3y old 4GB HGSTs and some sub-1y Toshiba 4TB N300s.

 

[Telos]

So all in all, I just wait until it fails.

Ditto that. I keep a cold one on the shelf

 

[WST16]

I was going to take it out and shoot it, for the cheek.

I would suggest secure-erasing or drilling it. I think shooting it is a bit extreme!
On the other hand, shooting it will surely make it give up the ghost (but it’s still extreme)

 

[Coop777]

Just found this alternate Syno forum - for both NAS and drives, I replace them the year after they are out of warranty....

 

[Telos]

I replace them the year after they are out of warranty....

Send them to me

 

[fredbert]

Send them to me

@Coop777 don't listen to @Telos send me a message ... I'll even pay the postage

I have an old NAS that uses old disks for Time Machine, since it's only used for those 'oh f&%$' moments of recent deletes. It's less needed now with sync'ed files and versioning. Clones of OS disks do the main backup.

RAID ... backup, backup, backup!! Of course it does depend on whether this is a business risk where cost of early disk replacement is cheaper than outages from failure and cost of total failure.

 

[Coop777]

Send them to me

I happen to have a quantity of 2, 4, and 6 TB drives for sale.....

 

[jeyare]

@SynoMan look for this
as I told you - approach change is here

 

[Telos]

as I told you - approach change is here

Well... that's certainly cryptic

 

[Lynx084]

For years I simply replaced drives with next bigger sweet price spot as my usage filled the array.
When the 4 drive array of 500g drives started to fill, I then cycled 1tb drives in. Then later, cycled 3tb ones in. In 20 years or so I think I only had one or two fails before replacement.
Back in 1988 I started doing disk to disk backups at work because disk to tape was taking too long. I adopted this at home soon after with windows servers.