I suspect that my two Western Digital 4TB Red drives are only 3-4 years old. I'm running FreeNAS 9.10 U3. I'm getting an error finding the ZFS filesystem that is striped across the two drives. Thought maybe I had done a mirror, no such luck. I suppose I can take these drives to someone who can do some tests to find out if one or both of them have gone bad. Can they be repaired? How about the data on them?
I'm debating the wisdom of buying any hard drive, especially one that is larger than 2 terabytes. The failure rate of large drives is too high if they fail in under 3 years. NAS is usually deployed to make large amounts of data or backups available over a local area network. Failing in under 2-3 years is not acceptable for backup purposes. SSDs seem to be faster and more robust, but they are very expensive at 10x the cost of hard drives. How many writes can an SSD take compared to a WD Red drive before it fails? How many times can you read a file before there is a failure between a 2TB WD Red hard drive verses a 2TB Samsung 860 EVO SSD? The former costs about $89.99 new, the latter at least $500 new. Does the SSD last 5x as long as the large high end hard drive? How repairable is the SSD when it fails? Increasingly, marketing hard drives as being robust seems to me to be nothing more than marketing. I don't care if you call your hard drive Red, Green, Black, Blue, or Purple. The result is the same, the drive fails in under 5 years. Although, I have some Green drives that seem to do better than that. Paying $500 for an SSD to put movies on is expensive, but spending $90 every 2-3 years could also be quite expensive. There's the time to rip the movies again that also has to be considered which is worth something when you have to buy a new blank hard drive. I may have mixed up which SATA cable is connected to which hard drive, but it is highly likely that at least one of the 4 TB hard drives isn't reading which makes mixing them up kinda irrelevant. I have 2 4 TB hard drives, 1 2 TB hard drive, and 1 500G hard drive. I'm bidding $500 on an SSD which I'll pay via paypal credit if I win, but I'm not thrilled about this. That is really expensive for me right now. Going the hard drive route, especially if I decide we need to do RAID or have offline spares, that gets really expensive really fast also. I can't convince my father, even myself, that hard drives are a good idea. I doubt I can convince him that a 2 TB SSD is an acceptable option either. Beyond 2 Terabytes, SSDS are prohibitively expensive. Couldn't you make a high capacity 5.25" full height SSD cheaper than a 2.5" half height high capacity SSD? Why is it that practically all SSDs you can get will fit in a laptop when desktops have a lot more room? If SSDs cost 2x what hard drives do, it wouldn't make sense to buy hard drives anymore. At 10x the cost, it isn't so clear. _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list PLUG@lists.pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
