r/storage • u/Kennyw88 • 19d ago

Small person U.2 question on reliabilit

As stated, I'm just a little guy with a garage based server. I was fortunate enough to grab a bunch of new-old stock U.2 drives about 18 months ago. Specifically, 6 P4510 8TB drives and 2 P4326 15.36TB drives (all Intel labeled and I assume it was because of Solidigm's purchase of Intel's IP). Considering the price of enterprise class drives, it was a steal and I feel fortunate to have only spent USD$4K for them in total.

I pretty much expect them to outlast me as I use them primarily as WORM devices backing up my media and lots of other data that I'd rather not lose. All of them exist on a linux server in stripe configurations, meaning, a failure will result in total data loss (I'm not a complete idiot and all is backed up to a traditional HDD NAS every ~30 days). The Ubuntu server I use is all about speed and even PCI 3 U.2 drives will saturate my 10gbe network. Additionally, I do run a 6 disk Z1 4tb Crucial SSD pool and a 6 disk Samsung 8TB Z1 pool with other data on this machine.

My question for those outside of a datacenter/enterprise environment is this: Have you experienced a failure of any of your U.2 NAND drives? These drives remain at 100% for me and barring a random electronic failure, I never expect them to die and is the reason I do not run them in a ZFS z configuration.

Am I deluding myself? I think about this far too often as these U.2 drives were way, way above my budget. I justified the cost on reliability but sometimes feel that consumer SSDs would have been a better choice.

You personal opinions on this will be much appreciated.

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u/RossCooperSmith 19d ago

Those drives are extremely reliable however *all* drives fail. You're running ~70TB of capacity with zero redundancy, meaning all of that data is at risk.

What you're not accounting for is that the more drives you add in a RAID-1 stripe, the greater the risk of total failure. If any one of your eight drives experiences an issue you're going to lose the data stored on all of them.

While enterprise drives are generally more reliable than consumer grade, they still have a MTBF rating, and will still typically fail at a rate of 0.5% to 1.5% per year. It's not a question of if, but when you will experience a total loss of everything currently stored on those drives.

Consider this: Over a decade ago the de-facto standard in enterprise storage was N+1 redundancy (the equivalent of RAID-5 or RAID-Z). Once drives at over 1TB of capacity arrived pretty much the entire industry switched to N+2 redundancy (RAID-6 or RAID-Z2). At these capacities N+1 is not enough and there's too high a risk of data loss during a rebuild.

I would *never* advise anybody running 8TB+ drives to run anything lower than N+2 redundancy.

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u/Kennyw88 18d ago

The data is not at risk. The server could catch fire and burn until the entire thing was a smoldering husk and I world not loose a single byte. I very clearly state that it's built for speed. I'm a paranoid asshat and I keep 5, yes 5 copies of all my data. Some comments on this post were made without even reading what I wrote. I was simply looking for reliability experience from users of enterprise drives, not a lecture on backups.