New Home media / File server build

Lazybones · August 08, 2015, 07:39:16 PM

FYI for those that are dealing with larger RAID sets I have had a second Seagate st300dm001 fail on me, not the worst but also not very good.

I think the high summer temps probably don't help.. My setup is in the basement and well vented but it can still get very warm in the house.

Tom · August 08, 2015, 07:45:12 PM

Quote from: Lazybones on August 08, 2015, 07:39:16 PM
FYI for those that are dealing with larger RAID sets I have had a second Seagate st300dm001 fail on me, not the worst but also not very good.

I think the high summer temps probably don't help.. My setup is in the basement and well vented but it can still get very warm in the house.

I've had a few of those fail. They are known to be bad. HDDs should cope with 50c+ internal temp just fine, so its probably not the heat.

Lazybones · January 01, 2016, 03:03:23 PM

Had a 3rd ST300DM fail on me this week..

And thus the problem with building a home array, lots of drives cost a lot so you end up purchasing cheap drives.

At this rate cloud storage is staring to look affordable.

Tom · January 01, 2016, 03:39:03 PM

Yeaahhh, I've had several cheap Seagate drives die. they really don't rate them for 24/7 use. I've started to switch to WD Reds. More expensive, but they aught to last longer.

Mr. Analog · January 01, 2016, 03:49:22 PM

My fear is that I buy the same make/model to build an array every time and that if one drive goes it's likely that the whole array isn't far behind

I've been "lucky" in that most of my array failures have been on the controller side (and thus unrecoverable in most cases)

Lazybones · January 01, 2016, 04:14:00 PM

The problem is that for RAID to be efficient the performance and latency of each drive needs to be near identical or the system needs to wait for things to sync up for writes and reads.

You are even supposed to ensure the drives have the same firmware level which can be impossible for many consumer drives that don't provide updates tools.

Tom · January 01, 2016, 05:13:55 PM

For software raid you really don't need to care about most of those things. You're not in it for ultimate performance on most home NASs. I pitty the foo who use hardware raid for a home NAS

Melbosa · January 01, 2016, 09:16:45 PM

Wow you guys have bad luck. My Synology has 8 bays and only lost two drives in 4 years. And I don't buy NAS drives, just regular old seagates or WDs, which ever is cheaper. And as I don't use it as an NFS target, 5400-5900s are good enough for 1080p streams

.

Tom · January 01, 2016, 09:39:44 PM

For me, I don't think its luck any more. Maybe a couple, or a few drives, but after like 5+ in the past few years? Nah man. nah. combination of tighter tolerances on newer hw, lowered MTBF/rated-on-time, and lower prices. The drives just aren't made to be used for what I was using them for.

Maybe your synology actually knows how to spin the drives down when not in use. That alone could save drives I bet.

Also I'm pretty sure I got hit with bad firmware on a few of my drives.

Lazybones · January 01, 2016, 09:54:45 PM

Well looking back at this thread this recently failed disk had been in service for close to 3 years.

I think I am mostly disappointed that the cost of the drives has not dropped.