bits read in comparison to drive size…
Standard consumer desktop spinning platter HDDs have a rated value of 1 error in 10^14 bits.
Typical enterprise drives are rated at 1 error in 10^15 bits. And some more expensive drives go as high as 1 error in 10^16 bits.
So…
- Consumer drives
10^14/8/1024/1024/1024/1024 = 11.37 TB
- Enterprise drives
10^15/8/1024/1024/1024/1024 = 113.69 TB
I have been running RAID 5 on consumer drives for as long as I can remember. I have have typically 1 or 2 drive failures per 3 year time frame. All of my drive failures have been physical failure of the heads or disk.
Typical desktop drives are rated for 50% or less power-on time. So, running a desktop drive in a server configuration such as Storj will exceed most consumer desktop drives rated power-on time and data transfer limits. Since this is true, running consumer drives in a RAID configuration is less risky than running them 24/7 … The drives are much more likely to fail due to stress of just running it 24/7 than reading 11.37 TB during a potential array rebuild… especially if the drives themselves are less than 4 TB and only 60% full.
And please note, the reported problem is only a problem during rebuilding of an array.