My Hard Drive is failing after 21 months

[RaddyKewl]

I have a 2020 Mac Mini, with 512 GB of onboard storage. I set up my system where my programs are on the onboard storage, and I set up an external USB drive for my Users folder, which contains all of my personal data. I've had them both since early 2021, and now the external drive is failing. I've only used 318 GB so far on the external drive, not even a full terabyte of the 5TB this is supposed to hold. The drive has been stationary, mounted to my wall, since I got it. It's already out of warranty from WD. And the one time I didn't get Geek Squad Protection, is the one time I have a drive failure. The drive has been running slow and I just noticed it start clicking in the last few days.

 

I've had many WD hard drives over the years, internal and external, laptop and desktop. None of them have ever failed. What would cause a drive to fail after only 21 months?

 

Since I'm gonna have to replace it, I'm thinking about plugging my new storage device directly into my Synology Router using it as a NAS. My whole house is hardwired with ethernet, and I don't believe the performance hit would be much worse than the external drive connected via USB directly to the Mac. This would also allow my other computers and Apple TV devices to connect to the NAS.

 

I was hoping I'd be able to get several more years of use out of this 5TB drive. Eventually I'll need that much storage, as I work with photos and video, but I don't wanna buy a 20TB drive just for it to fail before I get much use out of it. Would also be interested in building a RAID NAS for some redundancy. What would you all recommend for types of drives and the direction I should go? Also, can I put my MacOS Users folder on a network drive?

 

Attached are the drive diagnostics from DriveDX.

[Radium_Angel]

2 minutes ago, RaddyKewl said:

What would cause a drive to fail after only 21 months?

Bad luck mostly.

[SpookyCitrus]

Mostly luck of the draw, but also using an external HDD for user/program files and having it plugged in all the time is no good. Especially if you leave computer on a lot or just leave it on sleep. The drive itself may be ok, it could just be an issue with the enclosure.

[Electronics Wizardy]

Bad luck + 2.5in hdds aren't that great these days. The quality of 2.5in HDDs seem to have gone downhill after laptops and servers have stopped using 2.5in HDDs and switched to SSDs.

[OddOod]

2 hours ago, RaddyKewl said:

interested in building a RAID NAS

This is a compelling product for building a NAS
https://www.amazon.com/N1-Mini-ITX-Chassis-Computer-Aluminum/dp/B09WZLHCZG

It's BYOParts and has somewhat tight constraints on those parts, but seems pretty slick for what it is. Couple it with a reasonably low end system (though 16GB RAM would be ideal) and TrueNAS, you can set up a nice little RAID  Z1 array