5 ms·
In my experience the environment where the drives are running makes a huge difference in longevity. There's a ton more variability in residential contexts than
by rnxrx 2y ago
In my experience the environment where the drives are running makes a huge difference in longevity. There's a ton more variability in residential contexts than in data center (or even office) space. Potential temperature and humidity variability is a notable challenge but what surprised me was the marked effect of even small amounts of dust.
Many years ago I was running an 8x500G array in an old Dell server in my basement. The drives were all factory-new Seagates - 7200RPM and may have been the "enterprise" versions (i.e. not cheap). Over 5 years I ended up averaging a drive failure every 6 months. I ran with 2 parity drives, kept spares around and RMA'd the drives as they broke.
I moved houses and ended up with a room dedicated to lab stuff. With the same setup I ended up going another 5 years without a single failure. It wasn't a surprise that the new environment was better, but it was surprising how much better a cleaner, more stable environment ended up being.
- mapt 2y ago"Do you think that's air you're breathing?" This is no longer much of an issue with sealed, helium filled drives, if it ever was.
- stavros 2y agoHow does dust affect things? The drives are airtight.
- kenhwang 2y agoThey're airtight now (at the high end or enterprise level). They weren't airtight not very long ago and had filters to regulate the air exchange.
- Kirby64 2y agoThey're not airtight in the true sense (besides the helium filled ones nowadays), but every drive made in the past... 30? 40 years is airtight in the sense that no dust can ever get into the drive. There's a breather hole somewhere (with a big warning to not cover it!) to equalize pressure, and a filter that doesn't allow essentially any particles in.
- kenhwang 2y agoNo dust is supposed to get "in" the drive, but dust can very well clog the breather hole and cause pressure issues that could kill the drive.
- Kirby64 2y agoUnless you’re moving the altitude of the drive substantially after it’s already clogged, how would this happen? There’s no air exchange on hard drives.
- kenhwang 2y agoUnless your drives are in a perfectly controlled temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure environment, those will all impact the internal pressure. Temperature being the primary concern because drives do get rather warm internally while operating.
- Kirby64 2y agoSure, it has some impact, but we’re not talking about anything too crazy. And that also assumes full total clogging of all pores… which is unlikely to happen. You won’t have perfect sealing and pressure will just equalize.
- deafpolygon 2y agoeverything else isn't. the dust can get into power supplies and cause irregularities.
- Loughla 2y agoAre your platters open to air? Or was it the cooling system? I'm confused.
- ylee 2y ago>Many years ago I was running an 8x500G array in an old Dell server in my basement. The drives were all factory-new Seagates - 7200RPM and may have been the "enterprise" versions (i.e. not cheap). Over 5 years I ended up averaging a drive failure every 6 months. I ran with 2 parity drives, kept spares around and RMA'd the drives as they broke. Hah! I had a 16x500GB Seagate array and also averaged an RMA every six months. I think there was a firmware issue with that generation.
- kalleboo 2y agoA drive failure every 6 months almost sounds more like dirty power than dust, I’ve always kept my NAS/file servers in dusty residential environments (I have a nice fuzzy gray Synology logo visible right now) and never seen anything like that
- bitexploder 2y agoDrives are sealed anyway. Humidity maybe. Dust can’t really get in. Power or bad batch of drives.
- rkagerer 2y agoDon't know the details, but dust could have been impeding the effectiveness of his fans or clumping to create other hotspots in the system (including in the PSU).
- userbinator 2y agoExcept for the helium-filled ones, they aren't sealed; there is a very fine filter that equalises atmospheric pressure. (This is also why they have a maximum operating altitude --- the head needs a certain amount of atmospheric pressure to float.)
- bitexploder 2y agoHow does the helium stay in if it is not sealed? I am not familiar with hard drive construction, but helium is notoriously good at escaping.
- lorax 2y agoI think he meant in general drives aren't sealed, except the helium ones are sealed.
- bitexploder 2y agoOh, I see. Makes sense. I wonder if dust really can infiltrate a drive? Hmm.
- daniel-s 2y agoDoes dust matter for SSD drives?
- earleybird 2y agoOnly when checking for finger prints :-)
- sega_sai 2y agoIt is most likely the model's fault. I once had a machine with 36 Seagate ST3000DM001, they were failing almost once a month -- see the annual failure rate here https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive-q4-2014/ https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive-q4-2014/