Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?
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Do you replace or upgrade disk arrays based on their age?
Or do you let them spin until they die? -
Spin until they die, or more likely, until the server/workstation they are in is replaced.
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@Pete-S said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
Do you replace or upgrade disk arrays based on their age?
No, once they are healthy and spinning they tend to last and last. Replacing proactively rarely will help much and might actively make them less reliable. Not worth it.
There is a natural replacement process in that old drives are in old servers that go away eventually.
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@Pete-S said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
Do you replace or upgrade disk arrays based on their age?
Or do you let them spin until they die?This is the debate I have going in my head as you can see from my recent post about my dying Dell drives. Server is still under warranty but I keep double checking my backups to verify they are good.
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@scottalanmiller said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
@Pete-S said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
Do you replace or upgrade disk arrays based on their age?
No, once they are healthy and spinning they tend to last and last. Replacing proactively rarely will help much and might actively make them less reliable. Not worth it.
Good to know.
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@pmoncho said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
@Pete-S said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
Do you replace or upgrade disk arrays based on their age?
Or do you let them spin until they die?This is the debate I have going in my head as you can see from my recent post about my dying Dell drives. Server is still under warranty but I keep double checking my backups to verify they are good.
Verifying your backups is a good thing anyway.
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Spin 'em till they nah spin no more. Or at least until they throw up warnings.
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@RojoLoco said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
Spin 'em till they nah spin no more. Or at least until they throw up warnings.
Or that awesome clicking sound from the drive.
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Yeah this is something that has come up for conversation again. . Time to whip out the IPoD chart and how thinks could be reconfigured to get us to a better working system.
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For our own use, the days of hardware raid are over. Only software raid. And we don't put the OS of the host on it. So that makes the array easy to move and not at all coupled to the hardware of the box.
All enterprise drives have 5 year warranty. 24/7 that means 43800 hours. So my thinking is that when the drives hits that many power-on hours, they should be flagged for retirement. Power-on hours is also easy to manage since it's in the smart data.
Most drives in the same array will be of the same age. So often that means moving the data to a new array or maybe store it some other way. 5 years is also long enough that technology has progressed.
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@Pete-S said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
All enterprise drives have 5 year warranty. 24/7 that means 43800 hours. So my thinking is that when the drives hits that many power-on hours, they should be flagged for retirement.
What's the connection?
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@scottalanmiller said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
@Pete-S said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
All enterprise drives have 5 year warranty. 24/7 that means 43800 hours. So my thinking is that when the drives hits that many power-on hours, they should be flagged for retirement.
What's the connection?
Economical lifespan. Either run it until it fails or plan to replace it when it has done its duty and take advantage of 5 years of technology advancement.
The recycling market will decide what economical value your 5-year old drives have.
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@Pete-S said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
Economical lifespan. Either run it until it fails or plan to replace it when it has done its duty and take advantage of 5 years of technology advancement.
Is that really an economical lifespan, though? We normally think of drive economy as being best when we keep them far longer than that. And there is almost no tech advancement in just five years in drives. For most companies, this would roughly double the cost of drives as they normally get ten years from them, rather than five.
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@scottalanmiller said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
@Pete-S said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
Economical lifespan. Either run it until it fails or plan to replace it when it has done its duty and take advantage of 5 years of technology advancement.
Is that really an economical lifespan, though? We normally think of drive economy as being best when we keep them far longer than that. And there is almost no tech advancement in just five years in drives. For most companies, this would roughly double the cost of drives as they normally get ten years from them, rather than five.
Well, 5 years is what you can be sure you will get with a 5 year warranty. It wouldn't make sense to use anything longer when doing the investment.
Look at Backblaze for instance, the oldest models they have in use (Q2 2019) are 51 months old. That's a little more than 4 years. And they are very much into keeping costs as low as possible.
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Also if we look at density from 5 years ago, drives have gone from a max capacity of 6TB to 16TB.
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@Pete-S said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
Well, 5 years is what you can be sure you will get with a 5 year warranty. It wouldn't make sense to use anything longer when doing the investment.
I don't agree at all. Only going for the length of the warranty seems an absurdly short period of time to keep something. There is no additional risk after the warranty expires. All you are doing by replacing automatically is triggering the worst case scenario.
What's the worst thing that could happen to a drive after the five year mark? It fails. And what do you do to solve that problem? Buy a new one.
What are you doing here? Buying a new one, early, as if the drive had failed at the very young life of just five years. You are creating all of the negative impact of it failing at five years without it actually failing or being likely to.
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@Pete-S said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
Look at Backblaze for instance, the oldest models they have in use (Q2 2019) are 51 months old. That's a little more than 4 years. And they are very much into keeping costs as low as possible
As I say constantly to IT shops.... never use BackBlaze as a reference. Their needs are nothing like yours and trying to copy them will always lead to crazy decisions. This is such a common problem I've written about it in the past. Their reasons for replacing have nothing to do with warranty or death rates, but about the cost to operate at the highest density for their datacenter footprint... something that is totally non-applicable to normal companies.
https://smbitjournal.com/2016/10/smbs-must-stop-looking-to-backblaze-for-guidance/
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@Pete-S said in Spinning rust, how long do you keep it spinning?:
Also if we look at density from 5 years ago, drives have gone from a max capacity of 6TB to 16TB.
Sure... but that's of no value to the discussion of replacing drives. Literally none unless you are someone like BackBlaze and are using that higher density to stop from having to buy more chassis and/or racks. Just buying bigger for the sake of buying bigger does you no good. You are still throwing out perfectly good, burned in drives and spending money without needing to.
And bigger drives replacing smaller ones implies going to smaller, slower arrays. Since drives aren't faster today, and essentially not more reliable, that just means you are making systems slower. Paying to make things slower seems like a bad way to invest.
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@Pete-S maybe if you gave a concrete example of where you see replacing good five year old drives with new drives as good we'd see what you mean. Under normal circumstances, I'd replace the old drives with the same size drives today (don't want to lose speed or reconfigure) and just lose money.
