My RAID drive that went offline last week went offline again yesterday. That means real failure.

It’s a warranty replacement of a previously failed drive. Out of the Seagate drives I’ve used in arrays, I’ve had 1 drive not fail in 4 years, and I’ve had more failures overall than actual drives.

This is at three different sites, four arrays, different enclosures, systems, etc. Everything on UPS and surge suppression.

My WD RED drives are happy. At 1 year, no failures out of 8 drives. Though, one array was going offline due to a flaky controller. No problem with the drives though.

This array was populated in 2010, so the warranty is up. I’m replacing this drive with a WD Red 3TB. I’m only replacing one drive at this time, just due to budget, but Linux MD-RAID will happily let me mix in this newer, higher capacity drive.

We’re running RAID6, so there shouldn’t be any interruptions.

*knock on wood*