 Redundant array of inexpensive drives, very literally in this case, so in an effort to do some more free NAS torture testing and some longer term stuff, so we have the video which you can link below where we ripped the memory out of a live free NAS machine, we did it till we got bored and we're never able to corrupt ZFS on there, not because we didn't try even with high voltage, we only managed to destroy the equipment but the hard drives lived on. So I thought why not grab a bunch of really used hard drives. So we refurbished a lot of laptops and laptop drives are very inexpensive. So when laptops come in, we get rid of the old hard drives, there's not really much value to them. So I went and picked up some of these which are 3.5 inch to 2.5 inch adapters that would fit in our NAS box and since we have so many drive bays that we're just not using, we decided to pop 4 drives in for random laptop drives that all had some higher hours on them. I did check them for bad sectors because I know it'll, you know, it'll skip over the bad sectors but they are fairly used drives and they're not all the same. They are for, well two of them do happen to be Western Digitals but you know, there's a variety of hard drives in here and they're not even the same exact model Western Digital. They're similar, they're all 500 gig drives and they're all 5400 RPM drives. So this has actually been running for a while and I'm just now getting around to the video because we wanted to see how they worked over time. And yes, I did just pull this out of a live running free NAS box and this is where free NAS is really impressive of how it handles these. So despite these drives all being not exactly the same brand at all, they're certainly not enterprise drives and it's funny because, you know, RAID is redundant RAID of inexpensive drives and but I would never recommend building something like that for production. It's fun for testing but for production due by some NAS drives they definitely last a lot longer. But we're going to do some more durability testing on these, I mean it really takes a lot of time. They've been running for a while as in weeks but we've just been loading data up on them, pulling data off, loading data. They haven't had a single error and it's been kind of uneventful. That's the downside about some of the testing is the level of testing you have to do to try to get a failure on these is kind of, you know, it's impressive. But I just wanted to do this quick video to show you what happens for one when you remove a running drive out of there and pop it back in and how free NAS handles that and the fact that we're just doing a bunch of testing with non-critical data of course on these drives because we want to do some more free NAS resiliency testing and see how it works. We have been blessed to have extremely few failures in the entirety of free NAS. We had one drive go bad and we had the Toshiba's that gave errors for no particular reason in the mirror and pulled them out to the drives work fine. We think it's some weird incompatibility with the controller. But as far as what we've deployed to clients because pretty much we're using WD Reds at all of our clients or occasionally some of the Seagate ones, we really haven't seen this at any of the client deployments we have, any of these type of problems. But we wanted to do some more testing because it's always interesting to see, you know, if there's a failure caused by using odd drives or by using a bunch of old used laptop drives of not the same type and certainly not enterprise re-write grade. I know it'll take maybe years before they truly degrade but these already have years of use so we're just trying to see what would happen if we plugged them into free NAS and I'm pretty impressed. It seems to work perfectly fine. I don't have any stats, I didn't do an entire write performance test because I already know they're not going to be all that fast. We just have them configured in a RAID-Z configuration and they're not super fast drives to begin with. I think you gain a little bit of performance by having them in RAID-Z but just not a lot. That's not the nature of these drives but it does work. These trays are pretty cheap and so they are truly an array of inexpensive drives here. So that's it. Just wanted to show you how that worked and what happens when you pull the drive out and put it back in and how free NAS handles that as well. And thanks for watching. If you like the content here, like and subscribe.