Hi, Seabass. RAID-6 comes to mind, since it will support two disk failures simultaneously... and it sounds like you just may experience that with these disks. Does your disk controller hardware/software support configuring a RAID-6 array? Cheers. From: PLUG-discuss [mailto:plug-discuss-bounces@lists.phxlinux.org] On Behalf Of Seabass via PLUG-discuss Sent: Thursday, 31 December 2020 11:01 To: plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org Cc: Seabass Subject: Built for Failure Weird question: I can get a bunch of ancient (~2013) HDDs. Each have varying amounts of space, and few (if any) are ever the same size. These were marked to be disposed, though that is just because of age or having plenty that are better. Thus I can take them. However, them being this old, and having found about 3 that eventually broke or never worked, I'm left with this question: Because purchasing new drives takes too long (no idea when/if they would arrive), I can take as many of the decommissioned drives I'd like. Seeing as some failed, how does one build a system that is resilient to drives failing? It can be reset as much as wanted, hardware is literally in arm's reach, and there is not burning need for it to be up immediately. There is also massive (comparatively) external drive space and as many live boot USBs as one might desire. So how would one build a system that is designed expecting HDD failure regularly?