Hard Drive Failure's

[burt123]

Hello,

I am suffering a very strange occurrence with some hard drives I am using in some NAS box's.

In one box where I was using lot's of 250gb Samsung's & Seagate's, I would have problems with some of them not being recognised during the boot up process, so I would remove the "faulty" unit's, funny thing is, they all used to be OK under a Windows environment.

Then, in another box which I used only the Samsung 250's (which were ALL good), one just decided to die making lot's of internal clicking noises, prevent the system from booting.

Then another box with a couple of old (but good) WD 200's would act up, when the system was booting, but put them in something else, and they were OK.

Then last night in a box that had 6 750 Samsung's, (all were good), one just died, won't spin up, just dead.

Now am I just being very unlucky here, or is there something about the operating system behind FreeNas, that is hard on hard drives ??

I am now VERY reluctant to put any of my data, on a FreeNas system, in fear of something "breaking".

I have already lost a couple of gig thru failures, don't want to lose anymore.

Any comment welcome.

Cheers

 

[Stephens]

Let me guess, you installed the KMD (Kill My Drives) edition. If this were true, how many other FreeNAS users would experience the same thing?

You could have a power supply that's dying and taking drives with it. That'd be my first guess. I actually had a computer system once where I had audio speakers plugged into my computer and they were not designed for computers, and would send too much electricity back through the audio jack causing electrical problems, BSoD's, reboots, etc. I could unplug the speakers and the computer would run for days. Plug them back in and the computer reboots within a day. Then the PCIe slot died. Then a drive. Then the on-board video. Plugged them into another (old/scrap) computer and it started having problems. Don't underestimate the damage electrical issues can cause.

 

[cyberjock]

Burt123,

Your previous post asked a question about how to safely use older disks. Older disks can fail. I'm thinking you're just seeing disks not behaving because they are getting old. Some drives are also sensitive to vibrations and do not like being in enclosures with lots of other drives.

FreeNAS doesn't do anything "special" that's hard on drives. I would say it is probably more thorough in its SMART testing than other OSes are(Windows...cough). Overall, beng how small all of those drives are, I'm guessing they're at least 3 years old. I typically don't use drives that are more than 1 year old in a new NAS build. This is because if you put them in a NAS they'll most certainly be on alot(if not 24x7) and for at least a year or 2. If you're putting hard drives that are 3 years old into a NAS and intend to use them for 2 years then you're really expecting a 5 year life from them by the time you are "done" with them.

Per Google's white paper the annualized failure rate for large disk populations between the ages of 3 and 5 years is 8%, 6%, and 8% respectively. See more at http://static.googleusercontent.com...ch.google.com/en/us/archive/disk_failures.pdf

If you are just wanting to play with FreeNAS and get a feel for what it does and doesn't do, those are great drives. If you are planning to repurpose old disks and trust them to not fail, I'd reconsider that thought. You should expect something like 15-20% of those hard disks to fail BEFORE you hit the 5 year mark. That's a really high failure rate. Per your other thread I'd strongly recommend you do some RAIDZ3s at the minimum just based on your recent dealings with these drives. I'm not sure I'd trust a mirror because if the same drive in both mirrors fails you'll lose everything.

Not to mention the fact that it's probably cheaper to buy 3 new (that'll also help with reliability) TB drives and replace a whole boatload of old small drives eating power up all the time.

And as always.. do backups!

 

[burt123]

Hi Stephens,

I was really starting to think that I DID have the "KMD" version lol.

But this has happened in different "box's" with different psu's & motherboards, etc, etc, but as noobsauce80 has written, maybe I'm expecting a little too much from some older drive's, even though they really haven't done a whole lot of work.

 

[burt123]

Hi noobsauce80,

Very interesting reply, thankyou.

So it might be the SMART thing that is sorting out the weak one's.........it's just that I have never had so many failure's, 'til I started "playing" around with FreeNas.

I'll have to keep a few disk's aside, to have as a spare, 'cause I guess I might get more failures.

I very much doubt that I would have the NAS box's on 24/7, it's really just a place to store stuff, off my main pc's, for "safe" keeping.

One thing that really shocked me with the latest failure was I was changing some setting's on the gui, and when I saved the changes, the FreeNas box rebooted unexpectedly, and when it was posting, it "lost" one 750Gb drive, (and it appeared to be a SMART error) and would not find 2 drives that were on a Hightpoint controller..........weird to say the least.

And while I have your attention, there is something I would like to ask....with version 8.2.0 & later, I can't seem to find where to edit the power saving functions etc, on the individual disk's, it was very easy to find in v8.0.4, the view disk's tab, just comes up blank :(

Thanks for your ongoing replies.