Second Server Approach

[SSD]

I think my highest drive is somewhere in the 3 year range of use. But yes, some literally have a couple hundred hours on them. I've had these drives for years from my old media servers when 2TB was the biggest you could get reasonable, so pre flood. If I was starting over from scratch I would absolutely go with a tower and 8TB drives and never touch a rack set up. I've just acquired the drives and a ways back. I did recently buy some Supermicro 826 chassis new in the box dirt cheap. I may use them or might sell them, collect my profit and go the tower/8TB route. Undecided if I wanna give up my rack n chassis yet. They are like a part of me now!

 

Makes sense. My unRAID server is on 24x7 so physical age and power on hours are very close. Often wondered if keeping the drive spun down extended their life, as mine are sleeping most of the time. SMART tracks power on hours, but would be nice if they tracked spinning hours. But my experience has been the age much more than usage affects longevity.

[CyberSkulls]

Makes sense. My unRAID server is on 24x7 so physical age and power on hours are very close. Often wondered if keeping the drive spun down extended their life, as mine are sleeping most of the time. SMART tracks power on hours, but would be nice if they tracked spinning hours. But my experience has been the age much more than usage affects longevity.

 

I'm still getting disks pre cleared so not totally set up on unRAID yet. But mine always have been and will continue to be off (asleep) most of the time. I only run them when I or family members in other states (plex) want to use them. I'm coming from WHS2011 and it kept the disks spun down the majority of the time and was asleep the rest of the time. So they won't get up into high hours for. Long time. But when, not if, they begin failing, I will use up my spares then begin to replace them with larger capacity drives. But I've got like 60 of these drives so it might be a while

[hernandito]

My last 2 cents.

 

You should upgrade the hard drives as you go along... I have had drive fail... not a fun thing. As they get past the 6 year mark, I have had some go belly up. I have probably replaced a good 5 or 6 drives since I started tis. Upgrading slowly to newer and bigger drives keeps you from having all your hardware get old at the same time.

 

There should be no question on your mind about moving to 6.x  You will get to a point to where nobody can be of much help if you stay behind. If you can afford, buy another license and install on a clean thumb-drive, while keeping the old config files (read up on that in the tutorials somewhere). You can always go to the older thumb drive if you give up. Conceivably you could use the same thumb drive by backing itt up to a pc, but you run a risk there.

 

There is no doubt that Dockers, and all the good stuff you use, SB, etc. is much better than the old way. If for some reason your hardware sttarts getting long in the tooth, CPU, MB and RAM, you can upgrade those as well.

 

This is how I have done it. Pricing a new server for backups runs $1,400 in hard drives alone for my current capacity.

 

 

[trurl]

...There should be no question on your mind about moving to 6.x  You will get to a point to where nobody can be of much help if you stay behind...

If you truly want a set it and forget it setup then unRAID v6 is indispensable just for the notifications. Then you can forget it until it notifies you of a problem. Without notifications, you will forget it until it quits working and then discover you have been accumulating multiple problems that you may not be able to recover from.

[SSD]

But I've got like 60 of these drives so it might be a while

 

Upgrading slowly to newer and bigger drives keeps you from having all your hardware get old at the same time.

 

I don't know. Sitting on 60 2T drives - arguably some of the best made - would make me hesitate to continue to invest in larger drives just to call them new and bigger. I think 6.2 with dual parity will be just the thing to keep Cyber's server running for a while.

 

I might actually look at a RAID card, like an ARECA 1261 or 1280. With one of those you could create logical 4T drives from pairs of 2T drives, and get more drives in the array. Reliability would suffer a little, but with dual parity I might risk it, especially if I had backups or a means to recreate the data.

 

Not saying I would, but I would consider it.

 

As for 6.x, no question that people should migrate to it.