If you don't need the space, don't waste your money. Those drives could last you some time longer easily.
this post was submitted on 29 Oct 2023
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Where did you get the stat on most HDDs lasting 5 years on average?
This seems totally off. I have an HDD from 2012 that works just fine even though it gets a lot of I/O action (torrenting). I had older HDDs from the 90s and 2000s that also still worked after 7-10 before they were retired.
The HDD in my current has been in (heavy) use for just 3 years, but I don't thin it's unreasonable to assume that it will last another 5 years before it is replaced.
I second that 5 years seems a bit low. I have a backup NAS that has 10 4TB HDDs, half of them are 8 years old. I will be replacing these soon just for the peace of mind. They still seem to be working just fine. In fact, in the last 10 years, I've had two HDDs fail, they were a 4 TB Seagate NAS and a 3TB WD Red. The first was DOA and did not pass preclear tests, the second one died within the first three years.
P.S. I remember that I bought a couple of 2TB WD Greens for a ridiculously low price (I think it was $60?) before the floods hit the factories ages ago. They all worked flawlessly 24/7 for almost 10 years, I ended up retiring them for peace of mind. Definitely did not expect them to last so long, being the cheapest choice at the time.
I have HD’s from my first and only Synology DS209 running in unraid
Up to you. If you need more capacity, start replacing disks.
If you can manage four new disks, start over with RAID 6. this will allow you to run with fewer disks using less power, less heat, less noise. You can lose any two disks in the RAID and still keep rolling. With RAID 10, if you lose two in the same mirrored pair, everything is lost. If you want best redunancy then RAID 60 but Synology doesn't support that, and think it's a bit overkill imho.
RAID 10 with 8x4TB is just 16TB of usable storage. You can get four 16TB or 18TB (or even 20TB) in RAID 6 for 32, 36, or 40TB usable storage and use half the power. And give you four more bays to add more disks as you need them.
I just cycled out 20x 4TB drives that were flawless but with 100K+ spin hours each!
If they're big enough and you have backups, keep riding that horse!
Feel like I'm on a ticking time-bomb.
This depends only on one factor. Do you have backups?
How long the drives are operating is meaningless. The variance on the average HDD life is so huge that failure from lifespan is impossible to predict.
If you have proper redundancy and backups there's no reason to replace any drive, unless it's actually having issues.