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.
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
Except for the helium-filled ones, they aren't sealed; there is a very fine filter that equalises atmospheric pressure. (This is also why they have a maximum operating altitude --- the head needs a certain amount of atmospheric pressure to float.)
Don't know the details, but dust could have been impeding the effectiveness of his fans or clumping to create other hotspots in the system (including in the PSU).
>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.
They're not airtight in the true sense (besides the helium filled ones nowadays), but every drive made in the past... 30? 40 years is airtight in the sense that no dust can ever get into the drive. There's a breather hole somewhere (with a big warning to not cover it!) to equalize pressure, and a filter that doesn't allow essentially any particles in.
Unless you’re moving the altitude of the drive substantially after it’s already clogged, how would this happen? There’s no air exchange on hard drives.
Unless your drives are in a perfectly controlled temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure environment, those will all impact the internal pressure. Temperature being the primary concern because drives do get rather warm internally while operating.
Sure, it has some impact, but we’re not talking about anything too crazy. And that also assumes full total clogging of all pores… which is unlikely to happen. You won’t have perfect sealing and pressure will just equalize.
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.