Hard Drive Failures
I've experienced a number of hard drive failures these past 3 weeks, surprisingly all clustered around the same time. Two things come to mind: a. the power company had a big power spike that killed the drives, or b. drive manufacturers have discovered that they can manufacture drives to lower standards such that they die within the first 18 months, and that just causes people to buy more drives. I am inclined to believe the later.
In any event, I've experienced no data loss. All the drives were Western Digital units, which in my experience tend to fail slowly over time vs. other brands fail suddenly, which is worse. I was running in RAID 5 mode. Hardware-based.
In total about 9 Tb of capacity went kaput. So far I've replaced 3 Tb, and I have RMA'd the other 6 Tb to WD, who supposedly should replace the drives since they were under warranty. Let's see how well this works out.
All in, my max live capacity is currently about 23 Tb, so still have 16 Tb online while I wait to restore the other 6 Tb.
