I have had my unraid system running for more than 2,5 years now, and I would like to share my experience regarding my hd's.

 

I started out with 6 WD enterprise disks, namely WDC_WD2003FYYS-0 model (2TB). I then choose to keep all disks spinning to not

have issues with spin-up delays. Their temperature usually is about 30-35 deg.celcius at summer, but now in winter months they are at 25-30.

 

So far, 3 of those 6 disks have been replaced. The first one just died after less than a year. I replaced the second one this summer,

and the third one was just returned, and now I'm waiting for a replacement.

 

Failing disk 2 and 3 started throwing pending sectors. I tried to rebuild the disks to force re-allocation, but the disk just re-wrote the bad sectors and

was happy about that. The problem was that after a few days, the pending sectors was back. I tried several rebuilds, but the disks seemed to

refuse to re-allocate. I also tried putting the disks into another hotswap bay to cancel out potential problems with the bays, but the problems would not go away. Finally, the disks started throwing read-errors, and at that point I threw them out of the array, and replaced them, and after rebuild the replacement disks have not yet had any issues. All replacement disks have been precleared 3 times before use.

 

As per now, I have 8 disks in my array, 2 of them are newer versions of the initial ones. I check the array every day using the excellent smart view of Unmenu.

The oldest ones have been operating for 22800 hours, and have a load cycle count of >150.000. So far I have not lost any data I'm aware of. I did a filesystem

check of all disks a few days ago, and no corruptions were found.

 

 

I'm starting to think that keeping the disks spun down is a must, else they will all die within 2 years. The 1.2 million hours MTBF of the enterprise disks seems unrealistic. Perhaps they last that long if you never use them.

But at least they come with a 5 year warranty (5 years = 3,65% of 1.200.000 hours).

 

 

I have some questions: If I were to keep the disks spun down, will the disks still spin up every now and then to do the offline check of sectors?

I obviously want that to happen.

 

 

And can I expect any trouble with media players, both software like VLC/XBMC, and hardware ones like Syvio since the content will be initially delayed

for a few seconds?

 

 

And finally, how long do Your disks last  (>=2TB ones), and which ones have the best track record so far?

 

Thanks in advance for answers and/or comments.

 

I do not check my array as closely as you or keep track of disks ate the same but here are my experiences..

 

I spin my drives down if not used, I often find my system's drives completely spun down despite having things like Sickbeard running. My XBMC system do cause drives to spin up and I can get timeouts waiting for this to happen but it's no bother for me to retry the operation. A larger problem can occur if I'm watching a movie and a different drive is spun up by a background operation. This causes data to cease flowing while the drive wakes. I don't notice this often except when I'm trying to copy large files and also en a different share.

 

Drive life - I have few drive failures. I have everything from 1tb to 3tb drives and even an older 750gig! Some of my drives are nearly 4 years old and counting. I try to keep spindle couonts down so I retire smaller drives with larger drives as time goes on but I've repurposed some of the drives into other systems and they seem to do fine.

 

One thing I do do is use a Sharpie marker to note date of installation on the case of the drives and if a drive is used for parity I note that as well as when it gets moved to data drive duty. This helps on the rare occasion when I do have a failure as I have some idea as to age for warranty purposes (Ha!). In the past I've warrantied several bad drives but with warranties sliding downhill I expect that this may not be the case in the future :-(

 

I have a mix of drives, WD, Seagate, even some Toshiba drives. Mostly Seagate at the moment I think. I don't think I have any Green drives any more and have been sticking to 7200rpm drives mostly but if I need a drive and they're on sale... I buy! I have also learned the hard way to not buy lots of spare drives no mater the deal. By the time they get used the prices have often dropped and my bargain frequently wasn't! That said, I have 3x Seagate 3tb drives on my shelf (lol). I will likely swap these in soon and pull some drives out for use in a second NAS package on my ESX server - something higher performing but not primary storage and mostly just to learn from.

 

Hope that provides a little insigh as to my experiences so far, interested in hearing from others for sure!

 

 

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

Sorry for bumbing the thread, but I would like to know if anyone can answer my first question:

 

If I were to keep the disks spun down, will the disks still spin up every now and then to do the offline check of sectors?

And automatically spin down again when done?

 

 

Thanks in advance for any answers.

Sorry for bumbing the thread, but I would like to know if anyone can answer my first question:

 

If I were to keep the disks spun down, will the disks still spin up every now and then to do the offline check of sectors?

And automatically spin down again when done?

 

 

Thanks in advance for any answers.

That would depend on the drives themselves, as nothing in unRAID or Linux has anything to do with "offline" tests in the drives.

 

In my personal experience in helping others here on the forum, "long" offline tests are aborted if in progress and a drive is spun down.  I've never heard of a drive spinning up for an offline test.    I would strongly suspect no test will ever be performed if the drive is sleeping and the drive will simply remain sleeping.

 

Joe L.