[rnxrx]

In my experience the environment where the drives are running makes a huge difference in longevity. There's a ton more variability in residential contexts than in data center (or even office) space. Potential temperature and humidity variability is a notable challenge but what surprised me was the marked effect of even small amounts of dust.

Many years ago I was running an 8x500G array in an old Dell server in my basement. The drives were all factory-new Seagates - 7200RPM and may have been the "enterprise" versions (i.e. not cheap). Over 5 years I ended up averaging a drive failure every 6 months. I ran with 2 parity drives, kept spares around and RMA'd the drives as they broke.

I moved houses and ended up with a room dedicated to lab stuff. With the same setup I ended up going another 5 years without a single failure. It wasn't a surprise that the new environment was better, but it was surprising how much better a cleaner, more stable environment ended up being.

[kalleboo]

A drive failure every 6 months almost sounds more like dirty power than dust, I’ve always kept my NAS/file servers in dusty residential environments (I have a nice fuzzy gray Synology logo visible right now) and never seen anything like that

[bitexploder]

Drives are sealed anyway. Humidity maybe. Dust can’t really get in. Power or bad batch of drives.

[ylee]

>Many years ago I was running an 8x500G array in an old Dell server in my basement. The drives were all factory-new Seagates - 7200RPM and may have been the "enterprise" versions (i.e. not cheap). Over 5 years I ended up averaging a drive failure every 6 months. I ran with 2 parity drives, kept spares around and RMA'd the drives as they broke.

Hah! I had a 16x500GB Seagate array and also averaged an RMA every six months. I think there was a firmware issue with that generation.

[sega_sai]

It is most likely the model's fault. I once had a machine with 36 Seagate ST3000DM001, they were failing almost once a month -- see the annual failure rate here https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive-q4-2014/

[stavros]

How does dust affect things? The drives are airtight.

[kenhwang]

They're airtight now (at the high end or enterprise level). They weren't airtight not very long ago and had filters to regulate the air exchange.

[deafpolygon]

everything else isn't. the dust can get into power supplies and cause irregularities.

[mapt]

"Do you think that's air you're breathing?"

This is no longer much of an issue with sealed, helium filled drives, if it ever was.

[Loughla]

Are your platters open to air? Or was it the cooling system? I'm confused.

[daniel-s]

Does dust matter for SSD drives?

[earleybird]

Only when checking for finger prints :-)