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A drive failure every 6 months almost sounds more like dirty power than dust, I’ve always kept my NAS/file servers in dusty residential environments (I have a nice fuzzy gray Synology logo visible right now) and never seen anything like that

Drives are sealed anyway. Humidity maybe. Dust can’t really get in. Power or bad batch of drives.

Don't know the details, but dust could have been impeding the effectiveness of his fans or clumping to create other hotspots in the system (including in the PSU).

Except for the helium-filled ones, they aren't sealed; there is a very fine filter that equalises atmospheric pressure. (This is also why they have a maximum operating altitude --- the head needs a certain amount of atmospheric pressure to float.)

Yup, this is why the label will say something along the lines of "DO NOT COVER DRIVE HOLES".

How does the helium stay in if it is not sealed? I am not familiar with hard drive construction, but helium is notoriously good at escaping.

I think he meant in general drives aren't sealed, except the helium ones are sealed.

Oh, I see. Makes sense. I wonder if dust really can infiltrate a drive? Hmm.

I"ve heard 2nd-hand that helium will slowly escape (over a period of years).

>Many years ago I was running an 8x500G array in an old Dell server in my basement. The drives were all factory-new Seagates - 7200RPM and may have been the "enterprise" versions (i.e. not cheap). Over 5 years I ended up averaging a drive failure every 6 months. I ran with 2 parity drives, kept spares around and RMA'd the drives as they broke.

Hah! I had a 16x500GB Seagate array and also averaged an RMA every six months. I think there was a firmware issue with that generation.

It is most likely the model's fault. I once had a machine with 36 Seagate ST3000DM001, they were failing almost once a month -- see the annual failure rate here https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive-q4-2014/

How does dust affect things? The drives are airtight.

They're airtight now (at the high end or enterprise level). They weren't airtight not very long ago and had filters to regulate the air exchange.

They're not airtight in the true sense (besides the helium filled ones nowadays), but every drive made in the past... 30? 40 years is airtight in the sense that no dust can ever get into the drive. There's a breather hole somewhere (with a big warning to not cover it!) to equalize pressure, and a filter that doesn't allow essentially any particles in.

No dust is supposed to get "in" the drive, but dust can very well clog the breather hole and cause pressure issues that could kill the drive.

Unless you’re moving the altitude of the drive substantially after it’s already clogged, how would this happen? There’s no air exchange on hard drives.

Unless your drives are in a perfectly controlled temperature, humidity, and atmospheric pressure environment, those will all impact the internal pressure. Temperature being the primary concern because drives do get rather warm internally while operating.

Sure, it has some impact, but we’re not talking about anything too crazy. And that also assumes full total clogging of all pores… which is unlikely to happen. You won’t have perfect sealing and pressure will just equalize.

everything else isn't. the dust can get into power supplies and cause irregularities.

"Do you think that's air you're breathing?"

This is no longer much of an issue with sealed, helium filled drives, if it ever was.

Are your platters open to air? Or was it the cooling system? I'm confused.

Does dust matter for SSD drives?

Only when checking for finger prints :-)