I've been an UnRAID member for almost a year now. I started with using 3 sets of RAID1 1.5TB harddrives that were in my PC so, the drives were used. I just had my Disk 1 (sdd) die. The damn thing has always coughed out sector errors from day one. I ignored them because the data was always rewritten somewhere else and UnRAID kept chugging along. I know that harddrives will fail sooner if they run all the time. And, I know that UnRAID tries to spin them down when not in use. My question is what is the average lifespan for a harddrive these days in an UnRAID server with casual use? Also, since I now need a replacement.........what is the harddrive everyone is using in UnRAID these days that has the best reliability? Lastly, do most UnRAID members keep a spare harddrive or just order them when one fails?

 

Oh yeah, I will probably order at least two drives and convert to two parity drives.

Average lifespan is a difficult question as I've had drives of a year old die, but have got others that just keep going after 7 years.

 

I always keep a precleared spare ready.

 

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So you started out with 6 disks.  And you knew one of those 6 was already flakey.  That was a receipt for disaster right from the beginning.  What would have happened if another data disk would have catastrophically failed?  You could easily have lost all of the data on both disks!

 

The concept of any data protection system is that you attempt to keep the system in top working order.  Then when something bad does happen (and it will!), you have a very high percentage of being able to do a complete recovery!  (and if the data is irreplaceable, you should have a secondary backup, preferably offsite so a physical disaster is also protected against.) 

 

How long do hard drives last in unRAID?  That is a question that I doubt anyone has (or will ever) have an answer to.  First thing is that different models of hard drives from the same manufacturer will have different failure rates.  That means that a 1TB drive might (on the average) not last as long a 3Tb from the same model series.  Two different models from the same manufacturer will have different failure rates and modes.  And that is not even discussing the difference between manufacturers. 

 

All manufacturers have had a model series that they wish they had never produced.  And all manufacturers have had a drive series that seemed to run for ever after the infant mortality failures.  And past performance can't guarantee what will happen with the next model series. 

 

A further complication is that by the time, the user reports of the lack of drive failures begins to indicate that a drive has exceptionally long life, the drive is no longer being manufactured. 

 

Having said that I have a some 3TB drives that are between three and four years old.  I have some 1TB drives that are 4.5 years old.  I have also warrantied out some drives over the years.

 

Many people when they need additional space will swap out a small drive for a larger one.  (By the way, statistics will say that an array with a smaller number of drives will be less likely to experience a catastrophic data loss failure.)  Thus, many drives are replaced before they actually reach the end of their lives.  Plus, newer drives are usually faster so the server ends up with improved performance over time. 

Oh and one other thing, here is the only hard drive reliability report that I have ever heard of for consumer class drives:

 

    https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-stats-q1-2016/

 

The only caveat I have is that these drives run 24-7 and they are continually hammered which is not typical of most unRAID servers.