ReadyNas Ultra Drive Failure Rate

You're probably not going to want to hear this, but the use of consumer hard drives in multi-drive RAID enclosures will likely stress them to failure in far less time than they would in a PC chassis.

I've been a storage engineer for the last 12 or so years and recall the introduction of SATA drives in to the enterprise a few years ago (long before Netgear purchased Infrant for their ReadyNAS products). We (and every other storage vendor that introduced SATA disk storage as an option along with Fiber Channel) experienced incredibly high failure rates, many times greater than the MTBF numbers perscribed by the drive manufacturers. The consumer drives simply couldn't tolerate the constant rotational and vibrational stresses encountered in multi-drive RAID environments. It took sometime for the drive manufacturers to develop technologies that would allow their SATA drives to be used in multi-drive enclosures that utilized RAID.

Even today, most consumer SATA drives lack several features that dramatically extend the useful lifecycle of SATA drives when used in multi-drive RAID enclosures.

If you check Netgear's HCL, you'll notice they denote drives that include Rotational Vibration Safeguard (RVS), a feature developed to improve the lifecycle of enterprise SATA drives. Even though RVS drives may cost a bit more, they will certainly last much longer in a multi-drive chassis than those without. RVS drives usually include a longer warranty because of their enhanced lifecycle. Far from a marketing gimmick, it allowed for 24/7 use of SATA drives in enterprise environments.

FWIW, I have well over a dozen Seagate ES2 SATA drives in 3 different RAID chassis and I've yet to have a single disk failure. Now just having typed that, I'll probably suffer a failure tonight! (KNOCK, KNOCK)

That said, Netgear, Synology, QNAP and Drobo all suggest using RVS SATA drives with their products. It's unfortunate that many will fill their costly NAS chassis with cheap SATA drives that will fail so soon after deployment. I understand how enticing an $80 2TB hard drive might seem, but once you've suffered severe data loss, the extra cost is more than acceptable given the piece of mind that your SATA drive can withstand RV caused by such close proximity to other drives containing fast spinning platters and furiously oscillating drive heads.

The failures you've described sound extreme, but I'm almost certain that the failures you described (sector failures, where the drive head contacts the platter outside a track or between sectors, which are commonly associated with vibrational interference) could have been avoided by the use of RVS-enabled SATA drives.

I hope this doesn't sound judgmental, but I've described this issue to countless customers because they perceive the higher cost of the RVS-enabled drives as a gimmick and they've all found the detailed explanation helpful.

ToeCutter (I don't even want to know how you came up with that name...), that was very insightful. I've had an X6 and currently a NV and on both, I've had multiple drive failures throughout the years. Thankfully, it was always just one drive failing at a time. I just replaced one today in fact, a Seagate AS model 1.5TB. After reading your post, it makes sense now... though on the X6 I paid extra for the WD enterprise RAID specific drives (forgot the model #)... was laughed at by my friends since those still failed...

I suppose I could have posted a similar topic back in June, 2007 when I set up my trusty old NV+ with two Seagate 500GB drives, and had one fail within the first 30 days. But, I was more concerned about getting a replacement drive which I did at a local retail store. After it resynced and everything was back up, I RMA'd the drive and shortly thereafter received a replacement. That drive (a refurbished 750GB, I guess they were out of 500 GB drives) was used in other service, and the two 500GB drives in my NV+ ran for the next 3 years without any problems. In fact, they are still in other usage. They were removed with over 25,000 hours of use only because I was taking my NV+ to 1GB drives.

All drives can and will fail, usually at the most inopportune times. That is why the RAID system was developed. As Ukyo has pointed out, even the more expensive Enterprise class drives, while reducing the chance of failure, will still at times fail.