Should you replace a functional drive because it's old?

[Ouze]

OK, kind of a weird question.  One of the first drives I threw in my array was a 1TB Seagate Barracuda. This drive has, so far as I have known, never had an issue, and is currently working OK.

 

That drive is like, 6 and a half years old now. Does it ever make sense to replace a healthy drive just because it's old, or is it better to run it until it dies? It's 7200rpm, if it matters - I don't think I'd see a performance difference in replacing it, though of course the replacement would probably be 3tb. 

 

Just curious.  Thanks!

[strike]

Have you checked the smart data? If the smart data looks ok and it passes the smart test I see no reason to replace it. 

[SSD]

If the disk is running fine and SMART data is ok, no reason to stop using it. We have some nice features to monitor drive health, and if it starts acting up, you should act quickly IMO.

 

It is not usually the age but the capacity the drives me to replace disks. A 15 drive array full of 1T drives would max out at 14T. Not generous by today's standards. If I could buy 1T drives that were guaranteed to last forever for cheap, I would not fill my array with them. They are too small. But having a Methuselah 1T drive in the array would not bother me too much. It would slow down parity checks a bit.

 

You mention proudly it is 7200 RPM. But it would still be quite slow compared to 5400 RPM 8T drives. That is because the data density is so much lower on the 1T. In one revolution, the bigger drive would read so much more data that it would far surpass the faster smaller spinner, Only withe small random I/Os might the 7200 RPM 1T drive have a small advantage.

[Ouze]

Thank you both for the information, especially that bit about the data density - I assumed that the speed of any drive was more or less based on rpms alone, so any 7200 would be the same as any other 7200. So, I learned 2 things from this thread. 

 

I'll leave it alone until smart says otherwise.

[c3]

The one thing that does not matter is age.

 

You should replace a drive giving errors.

You can/should replace a drive if you need capacity.
You can replace a drive for performance, but in most cases this does not apply to unRAID data drives.

 

There is a thread(s) around which covers doing performance testing to find potentially "bad" drives. The idea is that by testing the performance the drive may show problem areas as dips in performance. If I run across the thread, I'll edit this post, or someone can add a link.

[SSD]

Good idea. Here is a link to the thread on the performance test tool.

 

If you've got a mix of sizes and RPMs, this will give a good speed comparison.

 

 

[jtown]

A little late to the party but I'll still give my $0.03 worth.

 

5 years is my rule of thumb, tho I've stretched that a bit on my array.  My two oldest drives are 6 years old.  They're getting yanked this month as I condense down to a smaller number of higher capacity drives.

 

Unless you've got a hot-swap setup with tested spares sitting on the shelf, I think it's better to get ahead of the failures and schedule your upgrades rather than react to them.

 

True story:  I recycled some of my old 2tb drives in a security camera NVR.  Within 4 months, one of those drives was throwing errors.  When I'm done condensing, I'll put my old 4tb drives in there.  They have fewer years on the clock.