I have a NAS configured as RAID 5. 4 drives, all 4 TB. I’m getting about 9 months useful life on my drives before I start getting media errors and have to replace the drives. I’m using WD SATA / 64 MB cache, 7200 RPM. For example, I’m replacing one today that I put in service on 7/29/25. My only question is whether this is within normal ranges of expectations or if this seems wildly out of proportion. Thanks.
That seems really unusual.
I have a 12-bay Synology NAS with Synology Hybrid Raid configured. I started with 6 4Tb drives and over the last 5 years it has been filled with 12 16Tb drives. In all that time I have had only one drive which developed media errors so I replaced it; none have failed.
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Thank you. That’s what I feared! So, the question is whether the drives are cheap (I think they are not) or whether there is something wrong with my NAS. I’ll see what I can figure out.
I am no expert but NAS use means permanently spinning and, depending on how your NAS is being used, a possibly a high frequency of access (as in, processes other than you actually doing something).
There are “NAS class” drives to be had. I use Synology’s own NAS HDDs. Specifically, I currently have 3 x 16TB HAT3310 drives, plus an old 8TB thing I had lying around when I first got the NAS.
These drives claim “up to 3 times the typical desktop lifetime” which is quantified as:
"a 1.2 million-hour mean time between failure (MTBF) and a 180 TB per year workload rating”.
I guess you might think to divide those numbers by 3 for a “normal” drive, but even that is probably well beyond what you’re experiencing.
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One thing it occurs to me would significantly add to the loading is running Time Machine backups to the NAS. I started out doing that, but stopped because the NAS is currently in my office and hearing the grinding drives every single hour of every day was wearing on me.
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What kind of NAS is it? Does it monitor drive temperatures - if so what does it show?
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I think heat is my problem. My drives are refills running in the high 40s to low 50s. I think i’m going to move the NAS to another location that has better temperature control and air flow.
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I’ve had my Synology DS918+ running since December 2019 with 3 drives and not had a failure yet. They’re sitting at 24°-25° C right now. I don’t push it hard, but my Air does an Arq backup to it hourly when it’s awake and I run Plex & Jellyfin for the house off it.
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If you are interested in comparing brands, etc. Backblaze publishes their reliability stats.
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on yours do you have it set as JBOD or a RAID? I understand that RAID drives run near constantly.
Thank you.
Maybe it is time to consider upgrading my NAS. But I am suspecting that the environment in the location I have the box may be the problem. I have an office outside my house, which we affectionately call the Sun Room. We call it that because it seems like it was once a greenhouse. As you can imagine, it gets very hot in there during the days. It’s air conditioned, but we only use the a/c when we are using it. That means the drives are probably subjected to a lot of environmental heat. Doesn’t get too cold at night even though we don’t heat over night, one of the benefits of living in SoCal.
But I’m going to experiment with moving the box and seeing if that actually resolves the issue.
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Big difference between a greenhouse in California vs a basement office in Pennsylvania!
That explains the difference well.
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My Seagate 18 TB Exos drives are hitting their 4th year of constant spinning on my TrueNAS server. I use them daily for video streaming , TM backups, etc.
I keep my NAS and other gear in the basement to keep it cool and also keep the noise away from where I’m usually at in the house .
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I’m running SHR and yes, I can hear the drives going when I walk by the basement door (it’s on a shelf I hung under the stairs)
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Those drives are running in a hotter environment than they’d likely see in a datacenter.
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I believe that one of the most important aspects of NAS drives are greater immunity to vibration. Having a small box with heads flying on many drives at the same time creates an incredible amount of vibration.
In my Synology NAS I use WD Red Pro drives. The Red series are NAS drives. I’ve never gotten less than five years on a drive. My NAS is in a cool basement area which probably helps.
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I also got a recommendation about using those red drives because of the vibrations. And apparently he makes the vibrations worse. Or maybe more constant because everything’s moving in a high heat environment.
My goodness that’s definitely not normal. I have an Unraid “NAS” which is basically just an old PC case that has 3 hard drives in it and an SSD drive. The hard drives are all white label WD drives shucked out of those cheap $175 (or at least that’s what they cost the last time I bought one) external USB drives. I have 1x 8TB and 2x 10TB in it. So my actual storage is limited to 18TB of usable space, as one of the 10TB is used as a parity disk.
I’ve been running Unraid for about 7 years or so and never had even one of these cheap non-NAS rated drives fail.
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