[Discuss] Aged hard drives and RAID

[pw]

Hello,

Recently we set up a SAS RAID at the office for
one of our servers. The idea of RAID is to provide
redundant storage in case one of the drives fails.

Around the same time I noticed that several other
drives around the office, all of which were originally
puchased new at approximately the same date, were failing.

The drives from the same order have either failed or are
failing within 6-7 months of each other. Some on the same day.

This brings the thought of drive failures in RAID to the fore.
If all the drives in a RAID are exactly the same age how much
safer will that RAID actually be?

Is there a way to get 'Aged' drives that are specified to
fail at even percentages of their life span?

It seems to me that being able to guarantee a differential
offset between drive failures in the same array would be a good
thing.

Of course, one could always run the RAID for awhile, then
remove one of the drives and replace it with a new one,
doing this for each drive in the RAID over a period of time.

If the average lifespan of a drive is 3 years should
RAID drives be cycled every 1.5 years?

Peter