Standalone backup agent for Microsoft Windows servers and workstations (formerly Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE)
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horhota
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Does Veeam Agent cause excessive wear on External Hard Drives

Post by horhota »

Does Veeam Agent for Windows impose extra work on external hard drives used for backup? In April this year we migrated to a new server(Windows Server2016) and started using Veeam Agent for Windows. From Monday to Friday, we run a backup job which lasts about 1 hour and backs up about 150gb of data. The rest of the day they should be idle. We rotate 2 external WD hard drives on Mondays and Wednesdays. In June, both of our external hard drives, only about 2 years old, developed problems and had to be replaced. This week, early September, one of the replacement drives failed. The operator who rotates the drives has remarked that the drives have been very hot to touch compared to "the past" - prior to our server upgrade and installation of Veeam. We used to use BackupExec but it is a dead product. I am looking for suggestions as to why our hard drives are failing so quickly. I can't believe it is Veeam but I would like to get some ideas as to what is causing this? Any help would be appreciated!
ejenner
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Re: Does Veeam Agent cause excessive wear on External Hard Drives

Post by ejenner » 1 person likes this post

You may find if you investigate the manufacturer and model that the drives you have are failure prone.

It's really common for manufacturers to bring out bad models of hard disks which don't have the expected longevity. Probably caused by the constant development of technology where new ways of doing things aren't fully proven before being made available to buy.

I've personally dealt with failure prone drives from Western Digital, Fujitsu and Seagate. In one case a user had 4 hard disks in his machine (one for OS and three for data) and two out of those 4 failed. Both the failed drives were the same make and model. Hitachi seem (entirely anecdotal) to be a more reliable manufacturer but it's hard to say all drives from one manufacturer should be treated with suspicion or equally should be trusted never to fail.

In your case, if you're asking if Veeam uses disks more than expected... that's only a question of time. If it used the disk half as much they'd last twice as long... but would still fail. You can turn off health checking and verification features and if you had ReFS formatting, indexing or compression enabled those things would cause more disk usage.
wishr
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Re: Does Veeam Agent cause excessive wear on External Hard Drives

Post by wishr »

Hello,

Sad to hear you got into such a situation.

I'd suggest investigating this with the manufacturers. There could be issues with the drives themselves/ports/wires (adapters)/software (drivers, if they have control over the power). Since it has happened several times, and the drives have been replaced you should probably look at the wires and ports first. It might be useful to measure the amperage/voltage to ensure it is in compliance with the manufacturer's recommendations.

Also, you mentioned your server has been upgraded. What exactly was replaced? Any changes to the power supply/motherboard? If so, that's where you should look at. If the drives are of the same model, then it could be just an issue with this particular model, as EJ mentioned.

Thanks
horhota
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Re: Does Veeam Agent cause excessive wear on External Hard Drives

Post by horhota »

Thanks to both of your for your replies and suggestions. I will research health checking, ReFS etc and see if they are relevant to my situation. The server upgrade was a new server - Dell T330 and WindowsServer2016. I will check the hd manufacturers forum and see if there are any similar reports for my hard drives. Regarding Veeam agent, I didn't know if there was any setting or configuration item that could impact disk usage/up-time.
Thanks again.
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