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My solution is to use a different manufacturer for each drive in a mirror. The prices are usually pretty similar and you get to make sure that one firmware bug

by cyphar 4y ago

My solution is to use a different manufacturer for each drive in a mirror. The prices are usually pretty similar and you get to make sure that one firmware bug doesn't kill your entire pool.

Hamuko 4y ago
I decided to employ this tactic when I was setting up my new NAS and needed two drives. Upside was that I could definitely know they weren't from the same batch. Downside was that I had to buy a Seagate, and I don't have good experiences with Seagate since my only Seagate drive had died an early death at the tender age of 3. Turns out that this was very much a downside since the Seagate drive died at the tender age of 16 months.
- cyphar 4y ago
  I had a series of WD drives that failed, and I managed to get them all replaced under warranty since they died within 3-5 years. I don't buy WD drives anymore but it wasn't the end of the world since I had spares while I waited for the replacement drives to be shipped. Anecdotally, I haven't had issues with Seagate but I'm sure it really boils down to which exact drives you're using and what batch they were in.
  - mst 4y ago
    Pick a manufacturer and you'll be able to find plenty of horror stories. Some may be worse than others but diversification is the right answer anyway.
    - xpe 4y ago
      But how do you color match your drives in your spiffy NAS? This is why my bicycle drivetrain should be a frankenstein combination of parts from different manufacturers? /s
      - mst 4y ago
        I hate absolutely everything about this comment. If we're ever both at the same conference show me a link to this and I'll buy the first round.
      - no-s 4y ago
        > But how do you color match your drives in your spiffy NAS? haha, pimp your ride!
  - Silhouette 4y ago
    I had a series of WD drives that failed, and I managed to get them all replaced under warranty since they died within 3-5 years. I find hard drive warranties to be mostly an illusion. It's better now that full disk encryption is becoming better supported and potentially available on personal devices and not just corporate ones managed by IT professionals. However until recently the number of drives I've had in any personal/home system that I would have returned under warranty instead of securely destroying to prevent the risk of data leakage was zero. The number of phones I have ever traded in is similarly zero. It's horribly wasteful but until there are cast iron guarantees that all the private data we keep on these devices is going to be securely deleted it's the only sane policy IMHO (apart from never using these devices for anything remotely sensitive in the first place but that's all but impossible in modern society).
    - cyphar 4y ago
      All of my drives have FDE. I wouldn't have shipped the drives if that wasn't the case (also luckily the issue was that writes only failed on part of the disk so I could wipe the luks metadata section).
iforgotpassword 4y ago
I do the same. Ages ago I once had to build a server at work and picked three vendors for the raid 5. Got funny looks drom coworkers, apparently they found the idea super strange. One drive (Seagate of course) failed after a year, and since we had a matching size WD lying around, used that. Now there were two WDs in the setup. Some years later the PSU blew up and killed both WDs, the Toshiba survived.
loxias 4y ago
This is the way. For even more peace of mind, (and only when you can afford it, obviously) try decoupling your disk purchases a bit from when you're going to need them. When you see a good price or a sale on a particular disk, grab it add it to your own personal "prebought disk pool". When it's time to either replace a disk or spin up a whole new array, now you have the benefit of diversification across time.
- Hamuko 4y ago
  My current procedure is to keep an external drive for backups and if any of the drives in my RAID fails, I'll just shuck the external and stick it in the RAID. The advantage is that the drive is already known to be good through running badblocks (which takes like a week to run), and I don't need to wait for a week for the Amazon man to get here. Disadvantage is that I need to recreate my backup from the start, which loses out my version history, or restore it from an online copy, which is slow and cumbersome.

by cyphar 4y ago

My solution is to use a different manufacturer for each drive in a mirror. The prices are usually pretty similar and you get to make sure that one firmware bug doesn't kill your entire pool.

Hamuko 4y ago

I decided to employ this tactic when I was setting up my new NAS and needed two drives. Upside was that I could definitely know they weren't from the same batch. Downside was that I had to buy a Seagate, and I don't have good experiences with Seagate since my only Seagate drive had died an early death at the tender age of 3. Turns out that this was very much a downside since the Seagate drive died at the tender age of 16 months.

cyphar 4y ago
I had a series of WD drives that failed, and I managed to get them all replaced under warranty since they died within 3-5 years. I don't buy WD drives anymore but it wasn't the end of the world since I had spares while I waited for the replacement drives to be shipped. Anecdotally, I haven't had issues with Seagate but I'm sure it really boils down to which exact drives you're using and what batch they were in.
- mst 4y ago
  Pick a manufacturer and you'll be able to find plenty of horror stories. Some may be worse than others but diversification is the right answer anyway.
  - xpe 4y ago
    But how do you color match your drives in your spiffy NAS? This is why my bicycle drivetrain should be a frankenstein combination of parts from different manufacturers? /s
    - mst 4y ago
      I hate absolutely everything about this comment. If we're ever both at the same conference show me a link to this and I'll buy the first round.
    - no-s 4y ago
      > But how do you color match your drives in your spiffy NAS? haha, pimp your ride!
- Silhouette 4y ago
  I had a series of WD drives that failed, and I managed to get them all replaced under warranty since they died within 3-5 years. I find hard drive warranties to be mostly an illusion. It's better now that full disk encryption is becoming better supported and potentially available on personal devices and not just corporate ones managed by IT professionals. However until recently the number of drives I've had in any personal/home system that I would have returned under warranty instead of securely destroying to prevent the risk of data leakage was zero. The number of phones I have ever traded in is similarly zero. It's horribly wasteful but until there are cast iron guarantees that all the private data we keep on these devices is going to be securely deleted it's the only sane policy IMHO (apart from never using these devices for anything remotely sensitive in the first place but that's all but impossible in modern society).
  - cyphar 4y ago
    All of my drives have FDE. I wouldn't have shipped the drives if that wasn't the case (also luckily the issue was that writes only failed on part of the disk so I could wipe the luks metadata section).

iforgotpassword 4y ago

I do the same. Ages ago I once had to build a server at work and picked three vendors for the raid 5. Got funny looks drom coworkers, apparently they found the idea super strange. One drive (Seagate of course) failed after a year, and since we had a matching size WD lying around, used that. Now there were two WDs in the setup. Some years later the PSU blew up and killed both WDs, the Toshiba survived.

loxias 4y ago

This is the way. For even more peace of mind, (and only when you can afford it, obviously) try decoupling your disk purchases a bit from when you're going to need them. When you see a good price or a sale on a particular disk, grab it add it to your own personal "prebought disk pool". When it's time to either replace a disk or spin up a whole new array, now you have the benefit of diversification across time.

Hamuko 4y ago
My current procedure is to keep an external drive for backups and if any of the drives in my RAID fails, I'll just shuck the external and stick it in the RAID. The advantage is that the drive is already known to be good through running badblocks (which takes like a week to run), and I don't need to wait for a week for the Amazon man to get here. Disadvantage is that I need to recreate my backup from the start, which loses out my version history, or restore it from an online copy, which is slow and cumbersome.