If you're putting them in RAID make sure the drives are designed for RAID and the OS/File System can pass the TRIM command on to the SSD's.

You can always get a case like this: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003IIBO56

And mount four of these in there: https://www.amazon.com//dp/B00V5JHOXQ

How is it formatted? NTFS? ExFAT? BTRFS?

WD Blue 8TB is a CMR drive and just as good as any NAS drive. But I'd avoid any consumer grade hard drives 8TB and under:

• Seagate Barracuda / Barracuda Compute
• WD Blue (except 8TB)
• WD Red (Red Plus and Red Pro are fine tho)
• Toshiba DT02
• Toshiba P300

The good news is that there's no reallocated sectors. However, 2E5 is 741 decimal value, which is a lot of pending sectors, I'd be surprised if they weren't bad sectors, and more to follow. I wouldn't trust it to safely retain any data. Backup your data immediately.

If you want to try to see how bad it is, do a full format and see what happens with those pending sectors and uncorrectable sectors. They may go away completely or they may end up as reallocated sectors (attribute 05) in which case it is likely on its way out.

Either way it's a 500GB drive 10-12 years old. Replace it with a 1 or 2TB SSD and call it a day. A drive that old with that many power on hours has a very limited life remaining regardless.

You're not even showing the full SMART output. Resize the window to show all attributes and repost.

But if truly 131088 reallocated sectors, the disk is likely dying and if you try to read data off it I wouldn't doubt if you'd start to get errors.

That is like a ten year old hard drive. If there's anything you need off there then dd the disk to an image file or if it's really important look for a data recovery service.

Buy from a reputable reseller. Serverpartdeals has gained respect in this community.

Refurbished = used = recertified. They don't do anything to them except maybe scan for bad sectors and sometimes reset the SMART attributes. But Serverpartdeals provides a 2 year warranty for most of their drives as far as I'm aware. Warranty is through them though not direct from the drive manufacturer.

If you're using Windows and Drivepool your only options are folder duplication in Drivepool and/or SnapRAID.

Perhaps look at setting up a separate Linux based NAS.

Never had to restore data thankfully.

You should do a trial restore periodically, even if just a small sample size, otherwise how do you know that it's actually working?

Yes, optical drives can just "go bad" while sitting. Even if not the laser, many of the mechanical parts can age and fail.

There is no "set it and forget it" medium in existence. Multiple copies, in multiple locations and if possible on different media types.

WD has the "WD Dashboard" utility that will allow you to run a LONG SMART test.

Right, but that chart is OLD and talks nothing of modern processes. SLC, MLC are much less susceptible to loss of data because of only 2 or 4 voltage charge states per cell. Looking at QLC especially with 16 different voltage states per cell, just a small voltage loss would mean data corruption.

This is likely more concerning for well worn SSD's however, and not for a reasonably fresh one.

You don't need to full format a new hard drive. You can if you want to make sure there's no errors on the disk.

As far as SMR is concerned, connect it through USB supporting UASP, that's usually more a part of the USB chipset on the hard drive than anything else. Then you can TRIM the disk. Just be sure to let the disk idle for a bit after trimming it.

Your best bet is to have multiple copies and validate your data regularly. Doesn't really matter what you store it on.