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Using old/"dying" hard drives as extra parity?

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SomeGuy133

2[H]4U
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Apr 12, 2015
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Is there any reason against using old/"dying" hard drives as extra parity? If i had 12 3 TB in Snap Raid and had 2 parity drives as recommended by SnapRAID could I use my extra 2/3 old/"dying" HDDs as extra parity? That would give me 4 parity drives. Any reason against doing that? They are not in perfect condition and have some bad sectors butt are "stable" for now. They cleared surface testing with no new bad sectors.

EDIT: I have a Norco 4224 and I only have 12 3TB drives at the moment so I have the space for them to make 14-15 drives with 4-5 parity...just because.

I have no other use for them so I was wondering if I could have extra parity drives while they are stable. Wasn't sure if they could cause a problem with corruption or anything so that is why i am asking.
 
Disks with bad sectors are not dying, they can work for decades. The only thing that is dying is legacy filesystems and RAID - which is not suitable any longer for consumer-grade harddrives with uBER 10^-14 specification.

Modern disks with bad sectors without physical damage (uBER bad sectors) are working within their specifications, so a limited number of unreadable sectors is simply normal and exactly according to what the manufacturer specifies for that drive.

And yes, you can use them just fine for ZFS or any other 3rd generation filesystem. Just make sure you use a redundant configuration. Without redundancy, bad sectors can eat your files, but it cannot kill the filesystem itself unless you are extremely unlucky if multiple disks have bad sectors on exactly the 'wrong' spot. Filesystem metadata on ZFS is protected with ditto blocks, meaning even a single drive with bad sectors cannot harm filesystem metadata. With redundancy, the same is true for your data.

Single disk = protection for metadata, no protection for data
single parity = quad protection for metadata, protection for data
double parity = 8x protection for metadata, quad protection for data

with quad (4x) and 8x i mean the number of sources that can protect against bad (unreadable) sectors. But normal protection (2x) is already sufficient since it is statistically very unlikely that multiple bad sectors will hit exactly the wrong spot so that the protection is breached.
 
_CiPHER_ said:
Disks with bad sectors are not dying, they can work for decades. The only thing that is dying is legacy filesystems and RAID - which is not suitable any longer for consumer-grade harddrives with uBER 10^-14 specification.
Click to expand...

It's drives like that make me cringe at not having some type of parity or redundancy.
 
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