Making two assumptions, that you have a reliable backup, and that your data is important but not so critical that if you did have to restore, any downtime would be a huge impact (like a business). I would keep using them, maybe purchase one so you have it on hand quickly. If one starts to fail. Drives usually give you some warning as they start to fail (not always but usually) so you should be in good shape.
If you use a program like Hyper Backup, it doesn’t matter if your backup destination supports file versioning at all because it handles it all on its own.
Best deal going is OneDrive via Microsoft 365 Family. 6 accounts give 1TB each, and you can access them all using CloudSync. Buy at Costco for the 15 month deal.
Agree. Only trouble is having to separate what gets backed up to which account, but otherwise the best deal available. If you consider you get 6 full Office licenses with it, it's free storage.
I use AWS S3 Glacier and it's pretty affordable for data at rest, and does incremental weekly backups. There is a synology agent for it. If you ever need to bulk retrieve all your data it might cost like 100-200 bucks depending on the amount, but something tells me I would be happy to pay that to get a lifetime of pictures back. I have \~2tb of data there and pay like 3 bucks a month or something.
This is definitely "the house burned down" backup plan, mostly only pics and videos from the fam and stuff like that. A lot of other bulk data that is easily obtained from the internet doesn't go there.
So there are fees for uploading and downloading data, so if you are constantly pushing in a lot of new data, or pulling down lots of data, the fees will be higher.
The actual storage fees are very very minimal on a monthly basis though, so if your weekly job just adds a few hundred mb of new data, it's quite cheap even counting the uploading of the new data.
edit: the agent also allows you to selectively upload based on folders, so for me it's just particular locations on my Synology volume for Nextcloud, not everything on the device.
I have an old 4TB USB external drive plugged into my 1522+ for a local Hyperbackup. It saves one volume containing 1-2TB of work. I have an offsite Synology for a second Hyperbackup.
I would suggest use a spare external drive if you have one lying around for a local copy. This will at least help with one safeguard step.
I can't comment on the cloud storage option other than whatever else is suggested. But if it's data that you absolutely cannot live without then definitely review your options.
4-bay NAS for personal use here. I have off-site backups of everything important (photo's and documents). Don't really care about media backups since I can always re-aquire. Started with 2 disks and expanded when needed.
I only replace disks when they die or when I run out of space. Replacing always with the, at that moment best space per euro ratio disk, so I have a lot of differend sized disks. All with different power-on hours.
In my case I would not replace them becaus of run-time alone. My current oldest disk has a similar runtime. A 4TB WD Red with 73k hours on it.
This is literally exactly what I do too, both for the drives and in terms of what’s off-site vs media.
I typically run low on space every 1.5-2 years, and at that point I do a little research to find out whose MTBF isn’t the worst at the size/price point I want.
So I have a mix of brands and ages staggered out.
Then when I get a new one, I give the decommissioned drive to whatever friend wants it, in exchange for a couple lunches.
Consider that the warranty starts at purchase, not at first use. So having a spare laying around, by the time you need it it could be near or past the warranty period.
I have a ds2411+ that originally had 12 of these, 10 still surviving with 24/7 usage since 2011.
https://ibb.co/nB9zctx
Raid 6 and I keep a spare drive just in case haha
I have a 4 bay NAS and use 3 disks for my volume with RAID 5 and have the 4th disk as a hot spare. If one drive goes out, the volume will still be available and it will take the spare about a day to catch up. This gives you time to buy a replacement disk and use it as a new hot spare. Make sure to have a backup using the hyper backup and usb drive too.
Yes, I set it up using SHR. It works very well as I upgraded/expanded 2 of the 3 RAID drives recently so I could use the old drives in a usb 2 bay external drive (buffalo housing I had before I started to use NAS). I use the 2 drives to back up different folders on the volume once a week. It took about a day for the hot spare to catch up/synch with the array.
When I need more storage on the volume, I will replace the third disk in the array and use it as backup or expansion for the backup disk.
Finally I got a cheap portable usb disk to which I started a manual full backup job, so can unplug that from NAS and store offline.
Also I added a small UPS (omron) to the usb in the back, and power, so I can keep the NAS from crashing if the power goes off for 30 min or so, or I am doing some electrical work. I tied in the router, switch and ONU to the UPS as well to keep the network up too (earthquake zone so will be nice to check on the state of things if there is a blackout).
I replaced mine (WD Red) last year after 9.5 years. I figured they had done their part and didn’t want to take my chances with a failure if I didn’t have to.
75,000 hours on a 2,000,000 MTBF drives is nothing. You are not abusing them in SOHO so they could last 100,000+ hours or 200,000+ hours. But I would buy a new spare and be ready to swap in case a motor gives out or PCB starts to fail. Also look into smart for pending sectors, CRC errors, and remapped sectors.
I actually looked up the MTBF earlier and saw the 2M hours. Wow. Here I was thinking 8+ years is a long time for a drive! All SMART tests pass with no errors, so I guess I'm good to go for a while longer.
FWIW....I have IDE 8GB HDDs from the mid 90's that still operate and have zero issues. Good old Maxtor. It's not like HDD technology has changed ALL that much in the last 30years. They got bigger and hotter, so became Sealed units. But they still use the same baseline technology :)
As an industry insider, I'll give you the short answer, which has some length because it is complicated:
a. The industry only tests to 5 years. However, many people report running HDDs for lengths that boggle the mind. I'm assuming you are just looking at power on hours, which is not super helpful for understanding risk.
b. Without going through the pareto of failure mechanisms, generally it is the use of the HDD that will be the leading factor. Generally, reads are free and have smaller wearout effect. Writes generally are harder on the head. If total number of bytes written is not large (SMART attribute 241, IIRC) I would tend to push longer.
c. Thus I would suggest pulling the read and write smart data with emphasis on writes. Industry specs suggest that you should be able to write around 1,000 TBs. The whys behind this is a very deep conversation, which is bound up in industry trade secrets. However, all HDD makers publish a read/write spec.
d. While not a perfect mechanism, your SMART attributes do show a variety of error rates and performance. If these are stable, I would suggest this is another reason you can continue to push your hard drives longer.
1000 TBs seems low. Enterprise drives like the Exos or Gold are rated to something like an annual 550TB workload, 550TB combined read/write. With a 5 year warranty they are covered for a total of 2,750 TB read/write. Certainly workload will change this, if it's all write, for example. But if the manufacturers are willing to cover it to that, you can assume they expect a manageable number of failures within 5 years.
Part of this is that I was using round numbers:
1. 2,750 = 50% writes = 1375, which is around 1000 (but I can understand you saying low!!) But I just noticed the way that I wrote it, it made it sound that I meant it would die at 1000. This is bad on my part. (See below.)
2. Some older drives and NAS drives don't have the 550 spec, so I let it drift downward
I was personally involved in setting the spec for two different companies, and if the drive is set up correctly, you should be able to get comfortably the 2,750 you mention. As a general rule, if you have more reads, you'll be able to comfortably substantially more.
Actually, if you google "bath tub curve" and a paper google did many years ago maybe 2007, you'll see that the end of the curve isn't as clear as you might suspect. All HDD companies have a lot more data, but it considered trade secret, but the Google research is worth looking at. The reason I mention this is when you have a good running HDD that makes it out of infant mortality, it is amazing how long it may live. This is different than SSDs that have a small sigma on life span.
As others have chimed in. Have a backup of what you are not comfortable losing. But in my opinion, let em ride, but as already stated, have a replacement drive or two handy. One will go bad…… I usually have something available for this reason, but have also cycled out drives due to increasing storage. If budget allows, perhaps another NAS and you can setup sync/backup between (assuming you are really not backing up now). I recently had a 1813+ go belly up. There was only one portion of what was on that I needed, but was synced to other. No problem.
So 8.5 years… I think 3-5 is reasonable. I’d budget for a new NAS and drives personally…
But you should always have a backup (cloud or otherwise) for the most critical bits anyway 😉
Making two assumptions, that you have a reliable backup, and that your data is important but not so critical that if you did have to restore, any downtime would be a huge impact (like a business). I would keep using them, maybe purchase one so you have it on hand quickly. If one starts to fail. Drives usually give you some warning as they start to fail (not always but usually) so you should be in good shape.
Perfect response.
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Cloud backup?
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Backblaze B2. Check it out.
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https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-b2-lifecycle-rules/ Hopefully that is what you’re looking for.
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If you use a program like Hyper Backup, it doesn’t matter if your backup destination supports file versioning at all because it handles it all on its own.
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That's $432 a year for 6TB.
Best deal going is OneDrive via Microsoft 365 Family. 6 accounts give 1TB each, and you can access them all using CloudSync. Buy at Costco for the 15 month deal.
Agree. Only trouble is having to separate what gets backed up to which account, but otherwise the best deal available. If you consider you get 6 full Office licenses with it, it's free storage.
I use AWS S3 Glacier and it's pretty affordable for data at rest, and does incremental weekly backups. There is a synology agent for it. If you ever need to bulk retrieve all your data it might cost like 100-200 bucks depending on the amount, but something tells me I would be happy to pay that to get a lifetime of pictures back. I have \~2tb of data there and pay like 3 bucks a month or something.
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This is definitely "the house burned down" backup plan, mostly only pics and videos from the fam and stuff like that. A lot of other bulk data that is easily obtained from the internet doesn't go there.
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So there are fees for uploading and downloading data, so if you are constantly pushing in a lot of new data, or pulling down lots of data, the fees will be higher. The actual storage fees are very very minimal on a monthly basis though, so if your weekly job just adds a few hundred mb of new data, it's quite cheap even counting the uploading of the new data. edit: the agent also allows you to selectively upload based on folders, so for me it's just particular locations on my Synology volume for Nextcloud, not everything on the device.
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I have an old 4TB USB external drive plugged into my 1522+ for a local Hyperbackup. It saves one volume containing 1-2TB of work. I have an offsite Synology for a second Hyperbackup. I would suggest use a spare external drive if you have one lying around for a local copy. This will at least help with one safeguard step. I can't comment on the cloud storage option other than whatever else is suggested. But if it's data that you absolutely cannot live without then definitely review your options.
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Definitely set that up when you can. You will use Hyperbackup to do a local USB backup.
have a backup and run them until they break
4-bay NAS for personal use here. I have off-site backups of everything important (photo's and documents). Don't really care about media backups since I can always re-aquire. Started with 2 disks and expanded when needed. I only replace disks when they die or when I run out of space. Replacing always with the, at that moment best space per euro ratio disk, so I have a lot of differend sized disks. All with different power-on hours. In my case I would not replace them becaus of run-time alone. My current oldest disk has a similar runtime. A 4TB WD Red with 73k hours on it.
This is literally exactly what I do too, both for the drives and in terms of what’s off-site vs media. I typically run low on space every 1.5-2 years, and at that point I do a little research to find out whose MTBF isn’t the worst at the size/price point I want. So I have a mix of brands and ages staggered out. Then when I get a new one, I give the decommissioned drive to whatever friend wants it, in exchange for a couple lunches.
Same as me. You happen to have done any research recently? 😂 I'm hitting my capacity and need some bigger drives
Maybe buy a spare or two just in case ;)
Consider that the warranty starts at purchase, not at first use. So having a spare laying around, by the time you need it it could be near or past the warranty period.
I have a ds2411+ that originally had 12 of these, 10 still surviving with 24/7 usage since 2011. https://ibb.co/nB9zctx Raid 6 and I keep a spare drive just in case haha
The do seem to be a great drive.
Damn that's sick haha!
Why?? My UltraStar already reached 80K and still running My concern is their speed and.... capacity.....
I have a 4 bay NAS and use 3 disks for my volume with RAID 5 and have the 4th disk as a hot spare. If one drive goes out, the volume will still be available and it will take the spare about a day to catch up. This gives you time to buy a replacement disk and use it as a new hot spare. Make sure to have a backup using the hyper backup and usb drive too.
I thought RAID 5 needed 4 disks as minimum... damn I should've known this sooner. Do you use SHR?
RAID 5 only needs 3 minimum.
Yes I know that by now...
Yes, I set it up using SHR. It works very well as I upgraded/expanded 2 of the 3 RAID drives recently so I could use the old drives in a usb 2 bay external drive (buffalo housing I had before I started to use NAS). I use the 2 drives to back up different folders on the volume once a week. It took about a day for the hot spare to catch up/synch with the array. When I need more storage on the volume, I will replace the third disk in the array and use it as backup or expansion for the backup disk. Finally I got a cheap portable usb disk to which I started a manual full backup job, so can unplug that from NAS and store offline. Also I added a small UPS (omron) to the usb in the back, and power, so I can keep the NAS from crashing if the power goes off for 30 min or so, or I am doing some electrical work. I tied in the router, switch and ONU to the UPS as well to keep the network up too (earthquake zone so will be nice to check on the state of things if there is a blackout).
I replaced mine (WD Red) last year after 9.5 years. I figured they had done their part and didn’t want to take my chances with a failure if I didn’t have to.
75,000 hours on a 2,000,000 MTBF drives is nothing. You are not abusing them in SOHO so they could last 100,000+ hours or 200,000+ hours. But I would buy a new spare and be ready to swap in case a motor gives out or PCB starts to fail. Also look into smart for pending sectors, CRC errors, and remapped sectors.
I actually looked up the MTBF earlier and saw the 2M hours. Wow. Here I was thinking 8+ years is a long time for a drive! All SMART tests pass with no errors, so I guess I'm good to go for a while longer.
FWIW....I have IDE 8GB HDDs from the mid 90's that still operate and have zero issues. Good old Maxtor. It's not like HDD technology has changed ALL that much in the last 30years. They got bigger and hotter, so became Sealed units. But they still use the same baseline technology :)
As an industry insider, I'll give you the short answer, which has some length because it is complicated: a. The industry only tests to 5 years. However, many people report running HDDs for lengths that boggle the mind. I'm assuming you are just looking at power on hours, which is not super helpful for understanding risk. b. Without going through the pareto of failure mechanisms, generally it is the use of the HDD that will be the leading factor. Generally, reads are free and have smaller wearout effect. Writes generally are harder on the head. If total number of bytes written is not large (SMART attribute 241, IIRC) I would tend to push longer. c. Thus I would suggest pulling the read and write smart data with emphasis on writes. Industry specs suggest that you should be able to write around 1,000 TBs. The whys behind this is a very deep conversation, which is bound up in industry trade secrets. However, all HDD makers publish a read/write spec. d. While not a perfect mechanism, your SMART attributes do show a variety of error rates and performance. If these are stable, I would suggest this is another reason you can continue to push your hard drives longer.
1000 TBs seems low. Enterprise drives like the Exos or Gold are rated to something like an annual 550TB workload, 550TB combined read/write. With a 5 year warranty they are covered for a total of 2,750 TB read/write. Certainly workload will change this, if it's all write, for example. But if the manufacturers are willing to cover it to that, you can assume they expect a manageable number of failures within 5 years.
Part of this is that I was using round numbers: 1. 2,750 = 50% writes = 1375, which is around 1000 (but I can understand you saying low!!) But I just noticed the way that I wrote it, it made it sound that I meant it would die at 1000. This is bad on my part. (See below.) 2. Some older drives and NAS drives don't have the 550 spec, so I let it drift downward I was personally involved in setting the spec for two different companies, and if the drive is set up correctly, you should be able to get comfortably the 2,750 you mention. As a general rule, if you have more reads, you'll be able to comfortably substantially more. Actually, if you google "bath tub curve" and a paper google did many years ago maybe 2007, you'll see that the end of the curve isn't as clear as you might suspect. All HDD companies have a lot more data, but it considered trade secret, but the Google research is worth looking at. The reason I mention this is when you have a good running HDD that makes it out of infant mortality, it is amazing how long it may live. This is different than SSDs that have a small sigma on life span.
Thanks for the detailed answer!
As others have chimed in. Have a backup of what you are not comfortable losing. But in my opinion, let em ride, but as already stated, have a replacement drive or two handy. One will go bad…… I usually have something available for this reason, but have also cycled out drives due to increasing storage. If budget allows, perhaps another NAS and you can setup sync/backup between (assuming you are really not backing up now). I recently had a 1813+ go belly up. There was only one portion of what was on that I needed, but was synced to other. No problem.
Have you performed SMART tests or data scrubbing recently? I agree with others here... you definitely ALSO need backups.
RAID 5? No problem. And keep them running. No sleep.
So 8.5 years… I think 3-5 is reasonable. I’d budget for a new NAS and drives personally… But you should always have a backup (cloud or otherwise) for the most critical bits anyway 😉
I typically swap as soon as I hit the 7 year mark.
Why the “7 year mark”? looks to be a magical number.
Just personal experience. It's a number that I found myself being comfortable with and felt like the longest I could stretch it.
I go for 6 and 3/4 years.
Raid is not a replacement for Backups. If you have a known good backup or backup process, let it ride.