Looks pretty much like my typical experience with WD. I've had maybe 30 of them, I don't think I still run any of them. WD fail a lot, and often with drama...
What drives do you favor and use now?
Lesson here is if it happens with bad sectors, back up what you can immediately while there is still a chance.
Yeah you could end up like me... around 4 years ago I built my server using some new and a couple of nearly new drives. I set it up as RAID 5 knowing that if one drive fails then I can simply replace that drive with a new one and rebuild the lost data. Sounds great! But I've since learnt that the rebuild process can often end up wiping out one of the other drives (it's a long winded process that hammers the other already aged drives).
So my dilemma recently is that the SMART status of the drives is saying that they are old aged and the power on time for some drives has clocked up over 5 years! Rather than risk a drive failing followed by a second drive failure and the loss everything, I've opted to buy a 5TB extremal drive and copy everything across to it. It took 22 hours
but at least my data is safe. My next project is to upgrade to RAID 6!
Mostly the 5400 RPM Seagates designed for NAS. The slower drives last longer in my experience, and run cooler, and in a NAS or file server, speed isn't that important.
For my workstations/laptops, I go with Seagate SSHD, although I plan to get/build a small laptop with SSD for car/airplane/train use (the moving parts really take a beating if used in a moving environment).
Yes, backup first, fix later. Also, from painful experience, back up important stuff first, then the rest, then fix.
I've opted to buy a 5TB extremal drive and copy everything across to it. It took 22 hours
I would advice against JBOD. I did run that once (although Novell, which was the OS on the server I ran it on, called it disk spanning), and you increase the risk of massive data loss a lot, especially if you have many disks. I lost one disk in an 8 disk span, and lost all data from all 8 disks. Sure, occasional bits of data could be recovered, but there were too many holes for it to be useful. Luckily, that was at work, so I had tape backups. Took a couple of days to get a new disk and restore it, though.
Now, I use a Synology DS1324+ NAS, and I really love that little guy. I use their own RAID, which gives me two disks redundancy, and the option to add disks later, even disks of different size and utilize all the size on the new disk (as long as they are larger). So, I now run with 8 disks, 2 of them are "wasted" space for redundancy, and three disks have to fail before I lose a single bit. I intend to get 4 more disks within a couple of weeks, which would give me 40 TB storage, where any 2 disks can fail without data loss. With an external disk cabinet, I can add another 12 disks if I wanted to (although I'll probably just get another 12 bay NAS instead, to reduce single points of failure).
If I wanted even more security, they have the option of adding "hot spares", which are plugged in disks which just sit there and wait until something fails, then are swapped in instead of the failed drive. That way, for it to lose data, three disks will have to fail in a timespan shorter than it takes to rebuild the first.
The thing is, 2 disks out of 12, or even 2 out of 24, is quite a low overhead for that much extra safety. In my opinion, it's very well spent money.
I got the numbers wrong, it should be DS2413+. It has, however, been superceded by the DS2415+, but the differences are minor.
Thanks Troberg. I am still going the simple route for now but will use this info at a later date when I am ready to go that route.They are very nice. However, if the price is too steep, they have smaller units as well. Not as many disks, but the same software.
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