Scrub Your NAS Hard Drives Regularly If You Care About Your Data

louwrentius.com

3 points·louwrentius··4 comments

I would add that if you are going to do this, then for sure have at least 2 NAS for each set of data. Scrubbing drives will for sure prematurely wear them out regardless if spinning rust or SSD's.

Consider instead encrypting the NAS if feasible. Either way, have at least 2 NAS devices, as one will for sure fail. If it's a true NAS, then S.M.A.R.T. data won't be useful unless it is sending syslog to something you monitor. Even DAS will not be visible if the only place getting logs is your event logs.

Frankly, I think that's a bit of an over reaction. Scrubs are normal and I don't think it's true that a drive read a month will wear them out. Sequential reads are easy on drives.

Encryption, only if that's really important to you. I don't think most people run with two NAS drives but you do need to find a way to backup what is really critical/important.

My article is geared towards home users / hobbyists and I wonder how many people have syslog running. Just plain email alerting would be a good first step and probably sufficient.

Do all the commodity home NAS support email alerts? I've only ever built my own so I had to make use of the OS that managed the drives.

Yes they do. I've build my own myself too, but I've setup alerting on a few for other people.

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