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Forum Discussion
When to replace HD due to age?
I have four 2TB WDC RE4 WD2003FYYS discs with almost 5 years of uptime. Neither shows any ATA-errors or SMART errors (running OS 6 6.6.1 so I am not sure if it can read it though).
They are not filled yet, but I am wondering whether I should replace them preemptively or wait for signs of trouble. I do have backup. Being old NAS, there is no point buying faster drives as I am limited by CPU/1Gbe...
They have clocked between 40000 and 42000 hours of uptime.
Regards,
3 Replies
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Personally I run mine until I see a sign of failure. I'm fairly aggressive on replacement (pending+reallocated sectors exceeding 20, any sharp rise in ATA errors, ...). I also have multiple backups.
WD gives an MTBF (mean time between failures) of 1.2 million hours on the RE4 series. But, of course, there are many factors that affect that and I'm sure their numbers are for ideal conditions. Many businesses change out hardware when it reaches the warranty expiration, which is 5 years on those drives. I think many home users end up getting larger drives before they get anywhere near 1.2M hours.
If all drives were purchased at the same time, you do run the risk that a second drive (being the same age) will fail when you change one out since resync is pretty intensive. If the time to resore data from your backup is not something you could withstand in your use, replacing a couple before they show signs of failure (but not at the same time, so as to stagger the ages), and keeping the old ones as spares, might be a good plan.
I just run a full scrub on all four drives. It took 7 hours to finish (not too bad considering 6TB useful space). Zero issues, zero SMART errors or reallocated sectors despite pushing 44000 hours. :smileylol:
Drives aren't hammered with small files daily but there is quite a lot of streaming going on (surveilance cameras on demand, PVR TV etc.) WD sure made RE4's to last. (UPS, no reboots, no-spindown and being in non-heated room probably helps, as drives never go over 25 deg C)
I guess I'll just let them run for sixth year and have a backup ready.
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