[level]

I built a server a few years ago, and I determined it was more cost effective for a drive to fail than to use HGST. It would be more inconvenient, but having a drive fail on a home server with only 6 drives didn't seem very likely anyway.

[jacobolus]

If you have a 2%/year failure rate per drive, then that leaves you with a nearly 12%/year chance that at least 1 of 6 drives will fail each year. Or a 31% chance that at least 1 of 6 drives will fail within 3 years. Or a 52% chance that at least 1 of 6 drives will fail within 6 years.

[sangnoir]

The question then is, would it be cheaper to replace that one drive or get the more expensive disks with lower chances of failing?

[Arn_Thor]

Isn't there a cost to time and convenience too? Buying a new disk takes time, as does rebuilding the RAID. And during that time you are vulnerable to another drive failure which could be disastrous if you only have one drive redundancy, especially during the very intensive rebuilding process.

[simcop2387]

There's also the cost of the time it takes you to replace the drive, get it replaced under warranty, etc. that takes a part of the cost of everything too. I decided that the (at the time) marginal cost of $20/disk was worth my time in likely not having to deal with it.

[cm2187]

Particularly if it fails within the warranty period.