My WD drives failed pretty consistently, so I'm now giving Seagate a try.
Well, my main reason was that WD decided that just failing "naturally" after a few years wasn't enough, but that a drive having been on for 3 years should be considered the same as "failing" (communicated through WDDA), which led to Synology adopting that for a while. Not sure what the current state is of that, but I intend to swap drives when they fail, not when they turn 3.
I had 4 WD Red 4 TB HDDs like WDC WD40EFRX and 2 out of them already failed SMART long tests and hat uncorrectable errors reported by the kernel after about 25000 hrs powered on. I've messed a lot with the drives bought 3 other used drives and it turned out that one of them had the same failure just undetected.
I was able to "fix" the issue by running testdisk in read-write mode forcing the disk to overwrite the bad sector. That's how I forcefully fix pending sectors on desktop drives. But it seems that WD Reds don't want to replace sectors because the data is still readable. The drive just needs a second or two.
I'm not happy with that but I'm also glad, I could confirm that's not an issue caused by my setup.
One would say, I should replace the drive immediately but I trust in ZFS and my backups. I would put the drive on my shelve and maybe reuse it as temporary buffer storage because why would someone buy such a used drive for a high price? In my eyes, it's still okay.
Yup. All drives kick the bucket at some point. That's why I use BB. I don't trust myself with NAS.
The ones that never failed me were any drives made by Quantum using SCSI interface. 5 drives, zero failure over 10+ years. But those were slower and cooler running units.
I’ve got a NAS backed up to Backblaze. It’s a nice setup. I can quickly recover from local data loss, or replace a RAID disk when needed, but if the NAS gets hit by a bus then I still haven’t lost everything.
That is a nice setup since it minimizes recovery time to nothing. I'm guessing you're using their B2?
I've had 2 drive failures since using BB so it's been worthwhile. But their Download software is pretty dreadful if you have large amount of files. I may try their ship-drive option next time.
Tracking their stock price, they are operating pretty lean, so I don't fault them for having crappy software.
Well, my main reason was that WD decided that just failing "naturally" after a few years wasn't enough, but that a drive having been on for 3 years should be considered the same as "failing" (communicated through WDDA), which led to Synology adopting that for a while. Not sure what the current state is of that, but I intend to swap drives when they fail, not when they turn 3.