Seagate shipping 8tb drives

Methanoid · 4 Jun 2015 at 22:07

Been that for a while at various places. Just got my refund on my 2nd dead drive (this one last 3 days).

Hard-Learned-Conclusion: Not good for heavy write cycles in any way. I have 4 x 8Tbs for data but I have got my parity stored on striped or pooled pair of 4Tb conventional drives.

Whatever you do.. do NOT do RAID5 or any kind of RAID on these drives (IMHO!)

kayomani · 26 Jun 2015 at 00:26

I have had one of these for about a month now and its only got about 300gb free space left on it. I haven't seen any issues although I did see writes as low as 5 MB/s not that I mind as you only need to do it once.

Did the drives just die on you are did they show signs via smart etc?

Methanoid · 26 Jun 2015 at 09:21

They died (well not so much died as "smashed through SMART limits") overnight during a long write cycle. I think they are fine drives but personally I would think twice about copying say 1Tb in one go to one of these.

Justintime · 26 Jun 2015 at 09:44

Had 3 die out of a 8 Drive array at work. Network manager gave me the other 5 as hes got no hope in them and i still don't want to use them lol.

Methanoid · 26 Jun 2015 at 09:47

Sell them.. but seriously... they are perfectly good drives but as I said in post 261 "whatever you do, do NOT use them in any kind of RAID"...

Justintime · 26 Jun 2015 at 10:02

Will probably sell them, yep they pretty much are not RAID drives, shame as we've had luck with consumer drives over the years.

Methanoid · 26 Jun 2015 at 10:14

You CAN use them in some RAID but I reckon you have to be clever how. I have mine as data drives in FlexRAID but my parity "drive" is actually 2 striped 4Tb drives of the "traditional" design.

Justintime · 27 Jun 2015 at 06:47

I get what you're saying but that is not ideal for us, RAID 0'ing the parity drives adds another point of failure whether it be the controller erroring the stripe or one disk failing etc.. and also the loss of a bay to another drive. Adds too much complexity in the mix for our uses

oxygene · 27 Jun 2015 at 12:04

I'll take a few off your hands

£100?
Just kidding.

wetpants · 27 Jun 2015 at 20:25

I might pull the plug and try one of these out.

The write once read many is appealing for long term archival storage plans.

deuse · 2 Jul 2015 at 14:41

Methanoid said:
You CAN use them in some RAID but I reckon you have to be clever how. I have mine as data drives in FlexRAID but my parity "drive" is actually 2 striped 4Tb drives of the "traditional" design.

So 4 of these in raid 5 on my qnap would be a mistake?
It's a media\photo\email server

Methanoid · 2 Jul 2015 at 14:43

IMHO yes.. cos RAID5 puts parity on all disks. These disks dont like a lot of writing. My 2 deaths came with heavy load... and parity drives take biggest hit.

FlexRAID is a snapshot RAID where you have a single parity disk. Since I have my parity disk made of "old style" HDDs I am not having any issues

easyrider · 2 Jul 2015 at 16:19

What about a videos backup 6.5tb ?

Methanoid · 2 Jul 2015 at 16:28

I dont KNOW. I am only sharing my experience with 2 deaths in quick use. I would be happy to copy 6.5Tb to one.. but myself I would do it in stages... 6.5Tb in one hit... Well its like creating 6.5Tb of parity files in one hit. It killed a drive, twice for me, before I learned the lesson

Justintime · 3 Jul 2015 at 15:15

deuse said:
So 4 of these in raid 5 on my qnap would be a mistake?
It's a media\photo\email server

Epic mistake.

deuse · 4 Jul 2015 at 06:52

Methanoid said:
IMHO yes.. cos RAID5 puts parity on all disks. These disks dont like a lot of writing. My 2 deaths came with heavy load... and parity drives take biggest hit.

FlexRAID is a snapshot RAID where you have a single parity disk. Since I have my parity disk made of "old style" HDDs I am not having any issues

Thanks for the info dude. I'll stay away from these then.

kayomani · 7 Jul 2015 at 21:55

Its a shame REfs is not in windows 10, I don' think i'd ever want to defrag these drives. Even with a low number of changes over time it might get fair bit fragmented after a few years.

smsmasters · 23 Jul 2015 at 18:29

I have a Seagate 80GB from 2002 and it still works fine to this day

Anyway I'm awaiting delivery for this drive. It will be perfect just for storing my music and video collection right?

ginjaninja · 23 Jul 2015 at 18:41

Testing my 8tb now....writes speads are not good in win 10TP, im averaging 80MB/s. But you cant argue with the cost per GB. I have the perfect use case, write once (or very infrequently) / ready many..a video archive..

I dont think these would be good even as non parity drives in raid, unless performance is a zero issue to you..

smsmasters · 23 Jul 2015 at 18:48

hernaldo said:
StorageReview website review is completely flawed and to be disregarded - for our purposes, that is unless you make use of hardware RAID or pseudo hardware RAID (as in firmware based).

These drives have a 25GB flash storage area that is extremely intelligent, when used with a hardware RAID controller this flash area isn't used and the logic built into the drive to compensate for being SMR based isn't able to be used.

Sustained sequential writes are perfectly normal, 180MB-85MB real world.
The RAID rebuild test they did was on a live system as well as the above.

In a word, ridiculous test conditions for an SMR drive that nobody in their right mind would use the drive in, though it does highlight that the drives really are useless in a hardware RAID setup. They perform quite reasonably in a ZFS/RAIDZ1/2 type situation where the logic in the firmware isn't bypassed.

Scrubbing takes much longer but these drives are perfectly fine in a 100% software RAID/ZFS setup for media storage etc. Currently have 8 in RAIDZ2, rebuilds are not the "10 days" people have been talking about. You're talking 2.5-3 days, which is on the very slow end, but not unuseable.

Where is your source for flash storage being used? This is interesting.