Hi all,

 

How concerned should I be about 187, Reported uncorrect error on parity drive (only 1 of them)?  Wait till the drive starts having multiple ones of these?  Or consider changing the parity drive sooner rather than later?

 

I have a "hot spare" waiting, but if I have to replace a drive, I'd like to get another one just in case.

You might want to read here:

 

     https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-smart-stats/

 

Personally, I would get the drive out of my server.  If you wish to see if that error was a fluke, after removal, you could test the drive for a couple of hundred hours (Preclear is one option to do this) and see if the count increases.  Realize that I have a low risk factor...

Thank you.  I will buy a new "drive" then and make my hot spare into the parity drive.

 

What's the best way to do this?

 

I used to buy external drives and "cut" them out of the case ($160): External hard drive

 

Looks like Amazon has internal hard drives anywhere from $110 (Seagate BarraCuda, 5400rpm, 256mb cache) to $130 (WD blue, 5460rpm, 256mb cache) to $180 (Seagate IronWolf 7200rpm, 256Mb cache). When I started, I remember always buying WD Blue, but then I thought they fell out of favor, and when I set up this system, the external drives were cheapest.

 

Any recommendations on what to buy?

Personally, I would avoid shucking external hard drives because you don't what model drive is actually in that case.  (Those external drive packages are a great place for manufacturers to 'dump' excess inventory!)

 

I also look for CMR drives rather than SMR drives.  (Google "cmr vs smr")  Obviously, the higher the spindle speed, the faster the read/write speeds are.  (However, I suspect that you already have a mix of drives with different operating characteristics so any improvement you might see would probably be minimal.) 

 

EDIT:  You sometimes have to go to the manufacturer website to find  whether a drive is CMR or SMS.  They will generally have a table there. 

Edited March 30, 20242 yr by Frank1940

Thanks a ton for that.  The $180 drive at Amazon is a CMR drive according to this article:  CMR versus SMR article

 

When I built this particular unraid server, I used 4 8TB drives, all from the same external drives from Costco.  So, when I go into the machine, I'll see what they are.  I would not doubt they are cheaper drives.  I'll consider slowly upgrading. 

 

Thanks again.

27 minutes ago, ctviggen said:

I would not doubt they are cheaper drives.  I'll consider slowly upgrading

Not necessarily cheaper drives!  Often drives just sitting in inventory or left over when a OEM cancelled a portion of an order.

 

Upgrade only if you need more space or a drive fails.   (I had a Seagate ST3000DM001 3TB drive (which had extremely high failure rates) that was installed back in about in about 2011-2012 that I just replaced.)  If it is working, wait until you need to do a replacement for other reasons!  A new drive is more likely to fail in the first year than a 10-year drive in that same time period!) 

 

41 minutes ago, ctviggen said:

So, when I go into the machine, I'll see what they are.

 

You don't have to do that.  Look at the MAIN tab of the GUI.  Under the 'Identification' column, you will find the manufacturer, model number and serial number for every drive in your server.  It is a bit cryptic but if you look at an ad for a drive that has a model number, you will quickly figure it out.

Thanks!  Using your guidance, I learned I have 4 Seagate BarraCuda drives, ST8000DM004-2CX188, 5400 rpm, 256 mb cache, which are SMR according to their website.  Maybe I get the CMR drive and use that as the parity, and just leave my current spare as a spare.  Will order the CMR drive and I'll decide what to do once I get time to add and remove a drive.