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The original was posted on /r/datahoarder by /u/lilgreenrosetta on 2023-08-30 17:59:43+00:00.

My first DAS was a Promise Pegasus R4, back when 4x4TB drives seemed like a lot of storage. Several times a year a drive would fail and I would replace it. This got so tiresome that I contacted Promise and they sent me a new R4, which didn’t change much.

Two years ago I replaced the R4 with an OWC Thunderbay 4, and I put 4 brand new 16TB drives inside it. Again, several times a year a drive would fail or there would be some other issue. Often a drive would be marked as faulty but then after a few restarts it would show as ok again. Currently the whole thing is somehow marked ‘read only’ because things are failing again.

I am by no means a power user. I’m a photographer and the RAID is where I store my archive. Current work lives on my MBP’s internal SSD and gets backed up to an external SSD. Only finished projects gets stored to the RAID archive. This is a few projects a month, ranging from 20GB for small photo projects to up to 400GB for larger video projects. Every now and then I need to access one of these projects but they mostly just sit there. I keep local backups of the RAID and everything gets backed up online as well with Backblaze.

I am getting so sick of having to deal with RAID issues, I’m thinking it might just be easier to use a bunch of loose 16TB drives and manage everything manually. The total archive is currently around 20TB so I could have the older stuff on one 16TB and then have most of the another 16TB for more recent stuff. Obviously with local and online backups of each.

What say you? Have I just been unlucky with my RAIDs? Is this normal? Am I doing something wrong?