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If the data or uptime is important, consider a backup and disaster recovery strategy with practice runs, using redundant servers, and mirrored arrays with drives from different batches. I think based on those things and other variables specific to your site and application - it needs to be a decision your team makes, not some rote age value. I do not have an opinion on how good/poor practice it is to run a drive until it shows signed of failure, so my answer would be "it depends" - on backups, value of the data/tools, size of the drive, intensity of activity, if it is in a mirrored array, and if the downtime to replace it can be afforded - which may be pricier than the mere hardware. I have seen servers less than a year old have a catastrophic drive failure. I've seen servers that are 10-15 years old with original drives still running and the function they perform unchanged. Drive age before/after these times tended to be considerably higher. The study suggests a "sweet spot" between 1 year and 5-7 years where you can expect less failures. I did locate this study completed in 2007:ĭisk failures in the real world: What does an MTTF of 1,000,000 hours mean to you? (I'm curious to see if people tend to run drives until they fail or start throwing errors, or if anyone takes a proactive approach at replacement using Power On Hours as a metric.)ĭrive manufactures generally quote MTBF on enterprise drives at 1,000,000 to 1,500,000 hours, but these numbers don't really mean much in the real world. What I want to know: is there a point where drive age alone is a significant enough factor to replace a drive, even if the drive is working fine and has no errors? These drives have no other issues or errors.
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I have several storage arrays where a significant number of the drives have been powered on between 25,000 - 30,000 hours (2.8 - 3.4 years).