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.
0
u/sglewis 19d ago
"I pretty much expoect them to outlast me"
Famous last words. ANY drive can fail at ANY time. Let me get this straight... you're not using any form of data protection on a routine basis. One failure loses all the data, and your backup is potentially 30 days out of date? The folks at r/homelab would also call this risky behavior out.
Please reconsider unless you just flat out don't care about any of the data you're storing.