Another 6TB drive has failed

posted on 11:13 PM on Saturday 09 November 2019

Just in May this year, one of the 6TB drives failed and this week another one failed. Checking around the online sites, I found that Newegg was selling their Seagate Exos X12 12TB drives for about $490 which is a lot cheaper than Fuwell who was selling the Ironwolf NAS for $565 and the Exos for $729. Buying from Newegg was a big savings of $240 which is about 50% of the price of the drive. And the shipping was just about 4 business days which would be similar to local shipping. So definitely worth it.

The drive that failed was a Western Digital 6TB Red which has been running for about 4 years and 2 months. So definitely not too bad.

I shutdown the system and had to restarted it again as I forgot to check the serial number of the failed drive for identification. On restarted, I realise that the drive was functioning well which was odd. No errors in the system logs so I let it resilver to see if it went back to working. The next morning, I realise that the resilver went through without any errors. However a short test in smartctl revealed read errors so I swapped the drive. That was a tad odd.

With 2 of the 8 drives being 12TB and the space filling up. It would be a matter of time that I would have to replace the rest and then increase the capacity. 8 x 12TB would be a lot of space.