Failure rate of HDD - External/Interal

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Nice info!

The eagate Backup Plus hub comes with 2 usb and it worked well. I do have one but i hear from somewhere that it makes decrease the number of USB that you can totally conect to a PC so a USB hub should be a better option. I do not remember where i read this.

In term of temperature the worst i have is the WD Black HGST HUS728T8TALE6L4 8001,5 GB. It has an internal cooler and temperature is 56 degrees… fucking trash and it should be great.

Two things that will contribute to your drives having a longer lifespan:

  1. Ensure proper cooling.
    Even if you are using external USB drives that house their own tiny fans, the drives will still heat up. Over a long period of time, it will reduce the drive’s life expectancy. Heat is an enemy.

Blow a fan, on its lowest setting (should be all the airflow that you need) over the drives. It will blow away the hot air surrounding the drives. It will keep the casings of the drives much cooler.

  1. Use an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), or, at a minimum, a quality power strip that has surge suppression (commonly mis-described as surge protection – you are not protecting surges – you are suppressing them).

Electronics are not fond of having their power suddenly cut, and suddenly restored. And when power returns after an outage (even a split-second outage), it is that moment when the power is about as dirty as it gets. You do not want your equipment exposed to that dirty power.

A quality UPS will switch to its batteries, resulting in 1) no sudden loss of power to your equipment, and 2) will stay on battery power for a few seconds, even once utility power is restored – so your equipment never sees the dirty power.

If you choose to use only a power strip, know that they differ in quality by miles.
Some will take a few power surges and will stop functioning as a surge suppressor – even if its blinking light indicates it is still suppressing surges.

Surge suppressors use metal oxide varistors (MOV) to absorb surges. Similar to an SSDs limited TBW, the MOV can handle a finite number of hits, and then your power strip become nothing but a power strip (no more surge suppression).

How will you know when your power strip has taken enough hits to kill its MOV?
I have no idea. But I imagine that there are electrical engineers that can test the power strips.

Get one with a very high joule rating (over 3000). They cost more. You could get a cheap one, but you would basically be buying a power strip with nearly no surge suppression, and whatever amount of surge suppression it came with, will not last.

If your budget can afford a good UPS, then get the UPS. Then, you can plug in any power strips (even with no surge suppression) to the UPS. Everything downstream from your UPS will be safe.

Cheers!

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Don’t you all badblock your drives before you start using them?

All HDDs have failure rates. At one end, a small percentage of HDDs fail on day one. At the other there is a small percentage of drives that just keep chugging far beyond their design specs. IMOP discussion of this failure rate is irrelevant to Chia farmers.

Chia farming is one of the lightest loads you can put on an HDD. It should never be powering up and down. It is accessed lightly, relatively infrequently, and once plotted, has few if any, writes.

My main concerns around HDDs for Chia farming are making sure that they are kept properly cooled and powered.

If and when a drive starts to fail it will almost always exhibit symptoms long before failure. If you are monitoring your system you will pick up on a bad drive long before it dies. At this point you probably have a few bad plots. You can choose to fix the bad sectors and try to get more out of the HDD, or just replace the drive. In either case you would lose and re-plot only a few plots. The rare, unanticipated, complete drive failure is of course the worst case, but even here there is a good chance of recovering most of your plots.

Drive failure for Chia farming is on the low end of the scale and in most cases should not result in loss of many plots.

Also, make sure to have your drives spinning constantly (avoid cycling them), it increases the energy usage a bit but it definitely helps a lot in the long run on durability.

Hello, some of my drives automatically hide from the farming machine. I have put the power option so that they should not sleep. Anyone know how I can take them back without unplugging and replugging them and how I can prevent them from being hidden?

I had the same issue and thought the reason was insufficient power supply. Windows was not seeing some disks. I changed the 650 watt psu to 1.000 watt and the problem was resolved.

Had similar unrecognized disks that were ok in another PC, due to inadequate power. In ur case, bizarre that 650w PS can’t handle a couple 5w drives, but a 1k PS can - fcol! It only took an extra advertized 350w to do it! There is certainly some engineering mischief going on with PS ratings.

They add up power from different rails (5v and 12v). Some PSU can be balanced to favor one or the other.

None of my NVMEs or 30 Hard drives has failed. Running 24/7 since June