Should a home server use hard drives with 60,000 hours on them?

A 24/7 NAS setup needs an upgrade from two 3TB to at least about 8TB. The planned storage setup uses ZFS with , so the same data is kept on two drives for protection if one drive fails. Cheap used 8TB WD Gold Datacenter are available on eBay.

The seller has a good and provides for each drive. The SMART health data looks acceptable. The concern is age: one example drive has only 17 power cycles but 66,420 powered-on hours, which means more than seven years of continuous use.

The key question is whether drives with more than 60,000 hours should be treated as EOL, or whether high-end datacenter drives can still be reasonable to use at that age.

Key points

  • The storage upgrade is for a 24/7 NAS moving from two 3TB drives to at least about 8TB.
  • The candidate drives are used 8TB WD Gold Datacenter on eBay.
  • The seller , , and SMART data look acceptable.
  • One example drive has 17 power cycles and 66,420 powered-on hours, or more than seven years of continuous use.
  • The main decision is whether more than 60,000 hours should count as EOL for this kind of drive.
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