Is there a way to tell what date a disk was installed in an array?

Not that I can think of.. Power on hours would be a good benchmark if the drive lived its entire life in the server.

Yeah, this drive already had hours on it.  I've replaced four or five drives in the last few months and need to know the order in which they made it into the server.

Do you have daily diagnostic emails? Each contains a current drive list, and if your emails aren't already purged you could look there, or any diagnostics zip files, or flash drive backups. (You do keep backups from each time you make major changes to the server, right?)

12 hours ago, tucansam said:

Yeah, this drive already had hours on it.  I've replaced four or five drives in the last few months and need to know the order in which they made it into the server.

 

Why is this important?  My observation is that once a drive is about two-to-three years old in the typical Unraid server, it will probably run for many, many years.    (I have one that is a 11.3 years old--- (~100,000 hours)!)  Unraid is not particularly hard on hard drives-- particularly if you spin them down.  Most of the time, many of us end up pulling a drive-- not be cause it failed --but because we need more storage space!  When deciding which drive to pull to increase storage capacity, Power-on Hours is as good a criteria as any other... 

 

If you really need this type of information, why not use a spreadsheet and track whatever parameters you think you will need using the drives serial number as the identifier. 

I replaced four or five drives in the last 60 days or so, and one of them is failing.  I want to make sure I return it to the correct vendor.  And yes, you're right, I need to set up a spreadsheet or simple list as far as what serial numbers get installed on what date, etc.