Lots of disk issues

The main storage server I built which has 10 x WD Red 16TB drives is having disk issues. I had one spare drive I purchased at the time. After getting a bunch of disk errors recently I bought 3 more drives as spares.

The first spare I put in refused to spin up. The second drive (brand new out of its anti-static bag) was giving lots of write errors. I'm now using the 3rd spare to replace one of the original disks that reported tons of errors. I can hear disks retrying but because they are so close to each other can't tell which one from the noise.

The drives state on the packaging they have a 5 year warranty so I will be sending some back. Recently WD are in the media with people reporting that WD drives have been giving warnings for drives that are older than 3 years (26,280 hours) and need to be replaced.  My original drives have run hours in the 11,000 range. If a drive is working fine there is no reason to replace it based simply on its age.

I will look at mixing the drive brands in the pool. There are basically only 3 brands: Seagate, Toshiba and Western Digital. Fortunately I built my own storage server and use open source software so I am not tied to any one brand.


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