Home NAS Solution

[Eric]

That’s scary - be careful, as drives bought in the same batch tend to crash around the same time.

I think it was a refurb, hoping I can make it 2 or 3 days with the single good drive as I wait for the new one to be delivered.

 

[Cmaier]

I think it was a refurb, hoping I can make it 2 or 3 days with the single good drive as I wait for the new one to be delivered.

I had a situation where one drive in my 12-bay synology died, and it automatically started rebuilding with the hot spare. While that was going on, a second drive died. (I have 2-drive redundancy) So I very nervously sat there for 3 days worrying that one more drive might fail (or that every time I swapped in a spare, another would die), but it turned out ok. Scary. (I have an active backup, but it would take forever to restore).

 

[mr_roboto]

I had a situation where one drive in my 12-bay synology died, and it automatically started rebuilding with the hot spare. While that was going on, a second drive died. (I have 2-drive redundancy) So I very nervously sat there for 3 days worrying that one more drive might fail (or that every time I swapped in a spare, another would die), but it turned out ok. Scary. (I have an active backup, but it would take forever to restore).

That's one annoying thing about hard drives - throughput hasn't scaled as fast as capacity, so it keeps taking longer and longer to read or write a whole drive. I remember when you could image a whole HDD to another in a couple hours. Not doing that with these 18+ TB monsters!

 

[Eric]

That's one annoying thing about hard drives - throughput hasn't scaled as fast as capacity, so it keeps taking longer and longer to read or write a whole drive. I remember when you could image a whole HDD to another in a couple hours. Not doing that with these 18+ TB monsters!

I think mine took 2 days last time.

 

[fischersd]

I had a situation where one drive in my 12-bay synology died, and it automatically started rebuilding with the hot spare. While that was going on, a second drive died. (I have 2-drive redundancy) So I very nervously sat there for 3 days worrying that one more drive might fail (or that every time I swapped in a spare, another would die), but it turned out ok. Scary. (I have an active backup, but it would take forever to restore).

We had an issue with 16GB SCSI Fast-Wide Server drives at IBM in the mid 90's. There was a whole batch of drives from Seagate (IBM branded) drives that had a high failure rate. As we had to use what we made, we, of course, had these propagated in dozens of servers.

All of the servers were raid 5, but we added two hot spares to each system and had someone monitoring the farm 24/7 while we worked through these drives dying like May flies.

IBM shredded an entire skid of drives at Seagate's direction. We had cases of drives from a different production run that we cycled in to replace the lemons....once they were available....prior to them getting shipped, we had to just keep cycling in the short-life drives and hoping we didn't have enough failures to kill any of the servers.

 

[rdrr]

We had an issue with 16GB SCSI Fast-Wide Server drives at IBM in the mid 90's. There was a whole batch of drives from Seagate (IBM branded) drives that had a high failure rate. As we had to use what we made, we, of course, had these propagated in dozens of servers.

All of the servers were raid 5, but we added two hot spares to each system and had someone monitoring the farm 24/7 while we worked through these drives dying like May flies.

IBM shredded an entire skid of drives at Seagate's direction. We had cases of drives from a different production run that we cycled in to replace the lemons....once they were available....prior to them getting shipped, we had to just keep cycling in the short-life drives and hoping we didn't have enough failures to kill any of the servers.

I am old enough to remember the Connor 104 SCSI HD (104 MB... that is right, megabytes), sticking problem. The head would stick to some sort of old matter (decomposing lubrication, I believe), and the method to unstick them was to bang the top of the hard drive.

 

[fischersd]

I am old enough to remember the Connor 104 SCSI HD (104 MB... that is right, megabytes), sticking problem. The head would stick to some sort of old matter (decomposing lubrication, I believe), and the method to unstick them was to bang the top of the hard drive.

When I was in college, one of my co-op jobs gave me a 286PC for home use that had a 2400 baud modem and a 20MB hard drive. (think it had 4MB of ram). Most of the kids in class only had 1200baud modems. My personal system (from another side job that took trade-ins from local businesses, was a 386DX40 (AMD) wit 16MB of RAM and a 320MB ESDI hard drive (that drive felt like it weighed 20 lbs) . I think the seek time on that drive was 32ms.

 

[Eric]

Successfully repaired so I'm back up with 2 drives.

 

[Andropov]

I had a 16TB drive bookmarked since May. It was €529 then, and I didn't buy it because the price was already increased significantly since mid-2025 (when I bought the NAS). So I figured, since I'm not in a hurry...

I just checked again today, and it's €833 now

 

[diamond.g]

I had a 16TB drive bookmarked since May. It was €529 then, and I didn't buy it because the price was already increased significantly since mid-2025 (when I bought the NAS). So I figured, since I'm not in a hurry...

I just checked again today, and it's €833 now

Ubiquiti has a 16TB drive for 599US (519EUR without VAT).

 

[Andropov]

Ubiquiti has a 16TB drive for 599US (519EUR without VAT).

That's still 628EUR where I live, which is quite a bit more than just a few months ago. But yeah, it may indeed be one of the cheapest options in the market right now.

I'm still not in a hurry, but given the current situation, I'm not sure if waiting any longer is wise.