In the abundance of caution, when (if ever) should one think about replacing a hard drive to avoid failure?

 

Should one look at read / writes that are listed on the reported on the Main page of the Tower Home page, age, or something else?

 

Thanks

Lewis

In general I tend to watch smart reports.

I do replace drives about every three years lately simply because of the speed the industry is advancing. I have retired all 1tb and smaller from storage servers. Replacing them with larger drives

 

Before  that it was all 250gb drives

When the price is right, I replace/upgrade . The price being right is completely dependent on your personality of course haha.

Waiting on prices dropping further, my aim is upgrading to 3 TB drives, or 4 TB if the price is right.

I've had SMART reports pass but the drive was completely bad. Wouldn't read/write at all. So even the SMART reports are hard to believe some times I guess.

 

 

Several years ago I bought 9x 400gb WD RE2 hard drives over a few different orders, had a couple fail within the first couple days or were DOA but then they ran fime for over 4 years.  Then one failed, the next week two more failed, and by the end of the 3rd week I only had 1 that was still working.

 

Moral of the story, well it depends on how much you value your data.  Hard drives will fail, the more you value your data the more pre-emptive you should be about replacing them.

 

If mine get any serious errors they get replaced.  If they are nearing the end of their warranty period, they get replaced (because somehow the drive just knows the warranty is about to expire....)