I've owned two EX495 units for about 4 years now; each has a 1 TB boot drive and two 2 TB storage drives. I use these only for client backups and zero other functions.

I have replaced every single HDD due to failure, in each unit at least once, and some of them more than once.

Are these units known to abuse their HDDs? I know HDDs are not exactly the most robust mechanical inventions ever created, but this seems excessive to me. Both units are sitting on a desk in an air-conditioned room, and there is plenty of ventilation space behind them. The fan speeds are in the nominal range, the HDD temps also report normal through SMART.

I've tried both WDC and Seagate drives, including "normal" drives, "server" drives and "A/V" drives, and they all seem prone to fail after 6 - 30 months. I'm of the opinion that a stationary HDD should last 4-5 years.

Several of them have failed within their warranty periods, so they cost me only time and frustration, while others have failed just outside of their warranties (like 1-2 months after ).

Or is it just me?

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The drives your running on your EX490 are they Advanced Format Drives and if so did you happen to check to see how they should be configured in a legacy OS? Some AF drives is not prepared properly will start off working just find then in a short period of time they will not be able to read the data on the drive because of the sector size issue in that the older drives use 512b sector sizes vs the 4K sector size in the AF drives.

I have every model series of the HP MSS and DataVault servers and have run them 24-7 for months on end and have not experienced a failure rate with drives like what your describing. These servers today although setup to run are basically idle and are part of my collection. Currently I run 4 servers 24-7 with 33 hard drives across them. Many of those drives are over 3 years old. Drives which I have pulled to replace like the 1TB drives were sent out to be used in my sisters or gf's servers and they are still running today and those drives are now 5 yrs old. I have lost count on the other drives in units in the house but its around 12-20 spread out in other servers and clients.

The highest Drive Failure Rate I have experienced has been with the 3.5" Seagate Drives but not with their 2.5" Drives for some reason but the failure rate is like 90% and it has always occurred within the 3-6 month period. I have lost a few WD BLKs most were older drives but I did have one fail within a couple weeks in a WHS2011 Server. I have lost a couple WD Green Drives right after their warranty expired. I recently had a 3TB Toshiba fail at startup so it went back. I have never lost a Hitachi Drive and the bulk of all my Server Drives are Hitachi Deskstars 7200 Drives.

I will also mention I have like 5 WD Red Drives running in my primary server for over a year now and they are running just fine although they did have many people complaining about failure rates early on. Time will tell but for me I am most happy with my Hitachi Drives.

On a side note I will mention recently I had a 1990 Quantum Hard Drive fail in my Amiga 2000HD which annoyed me but hey it was 24 yrs old and for many years that drive as well as others ran 24-7 in my BBS. Not a big deal because I still have a good supply of older 50 Pin SCSI Drives to play with. Guess they do not make drives to last like they use to.

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Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

My drives have failed after 6-30 months of normal use, so I don't think it's a configuration or formatting error. Furthermore, the drives are typically unreadable once I remove them from the EX495 and plug them into another machine for SMART diagnostics, etc. In most cases they make clicking noises, refuse to spin up, etc. So they're dead, Jim.

I doubt very much that the root cause is environmental, because I have several other servers on the same desk that have been far more reliable.

_________________
Never refuse a breath mint.

That's not typical for any MSS so something is running a muck with your hardware.

_________________
Exploring the possibilities!

Migrated from WHS2011 to WS2012E: HIGHLANDER

~ Norco 4220 Enclosure
~ Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5
~ AMD Phenom II X4 995 3.2 GHz
~ 8 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
~ 3 Supermicro AOC-SASLP-MV8

Just guessing but possibly it is your PSU is faulty.

Or the backplane may need to be reseated.
If that is the case then a general cleaning would be in order.

Of course it could be just plain bad luck with the drives.

I have had my share of failed drives.
But I know I have two that are at least 6 years old.

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