I once had a 20-drive NAS with 1 TB Samsung Spinpoints F1s. The NAS is replaced but I still have the drives just for labbing / testing purposes. I never had a

I once had a 20-drive NAS with 1 TB Samsung Spinpoints F1s. The NAS is replaced but I still have the drives just for labbing / testing purposes. I never had a drive failure during the lifetime of the NAS. Probably because it was off most of the time and only powered-on with wakeonlan when needed. So those drives don’t have many hours on them. But recently they started dying. I lost 3 of them this year during some tests. Imagine that these drives are probably 10+ years old. Age does seem to matter. Obviously this is a small uncontrolled sample but it seems that you really should keep this in mind when you run a NAS at home. Keep an eye on the SMART parameters as suggested by Backblaze and really consider replacing drives at some point. I would be afraid that drives do start dying at the same time due to age.