Advice? How to cull weakest drive(s) from my array.


johnny121b

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Server:  All 2Tb drives, ALL filled; WD, Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi.  (None w/ reallocated sectors)

 

Want to begin swapping out 2Tb drives for larger.....but which to choose first??

 

None have given me any trouble.....

 

Should I simply begin by upgrading the drives with the highest power-on hours?  Or is there a more reliable SMART factor I should use in choose the first to go??

 

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Assuming all the SMART reports look the same other than power-on hours then that's probably just as good as any method to start replacing the drives. Also, after you upgrade one of your drives to something bigger you could pre-clear the old 2TB drive and keep it as a spare in the event one of the other 2TB drives starts to give you issues.

 

Although if it was me I would personally start with the Seagate drives just because I do not like seeing the high Seek_Error_Rate (even though it doesn't indicate anything bad). It just bugs me...

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Server:  All 2Tb drives, ALL filled; WD, Seagate, Samsung, Hitachi.  (None w/ reallocated sectors)

 

Want to begin swapping out 2Tb drives for larger.....but which to choose first??

 

None have given me any trouble.....

 

Should I simply begin by upgrading the drives with the highest power-on hours?  Or is there a more reliable SMART factor I should use in choose the first to go??

Since you personally aren't seeing any issues, maybe see if any of your specific models are in the backblaze failure listings and use their data as well? Barring that, if you don't have full backups, maybe replace based on value of the data they contain, since the drive you pull will still contain it until you alter it. Having a full set of working pulled array drives to recover from is one way to get a decent backup.
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You can pick by brand or age or random... just keep them on hand to replace any that do fail. Predicting drive failure is practically impossible. Most SMART values are actually just reporting after failure, not before. ie, pending sectors have already failed to be read.

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