2.5" 2TB drives for NAS use

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Helzy

Active Member
Oct 19, 2017
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Greetings all,

Seagate is not making any 2.5" Ironwolf drives currently and I was wondering about replacing a batch of four WD Blue 2.5" 5400 RPM drives in a NAS enclosure (Qnap SS-839 Pro) with these new 2TB Seagate ST2000LM015 drives. I have multiple WD Red 2.5" wd10jfcx drives, but they top out at 1TB. The Barracudas have a similar pricepoint for the 2TB model. Wondering if anyone has tried them or can point to a review of them in NAS use as my google-fu seems to be escaping me at them moment.

Thanks!
 

whitey

Moderator
Jun 30, 2014
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Many of us here took this route for 2.5 capacity drives (WARNING, shucking involved). There is a lengthy thread around here as well, let me grab it for you.

Seagate Backup Plus 4TB Drive - Cheap 2.5" 4TB drives

I have 6 I am always beating on in a ZFS raidz2, good nuff' and double the capacity of the drives you are looking at for $20 more roughly each drive than the ones you listed.

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Expa...8492944&sr=8-2&keywords=seagate+expansion+4tb

https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Back...92922&sr=8-3&keywords=seagate+backup+plus+4tb
 
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Evan

Well-Known Member
Jan 6, 2016
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Or better yet the 5tb Seagate drives. (Shucked of course).
There is some people who are saying the 5tb is better than the 4tb drives. Not sure if everybody agrees but just putting it out there (I have not 4tb drives and only 5tb and so far all good)
 

Joel

Active Member
Jan 30, 2015
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5tbs are the same model of backup plus. I have two of the 4tb versions and no complaints except that they're kinda slow. Mine are still in the enclosures though.

I also have a 2tb slim inside my laptop alongside a Samsung PM951 NVME. The seek noises are kinda loud actually. I've been wondering for quite a while why WD hasn't come out with a 2tb 2.5 Red. Also of note, the Seagate model used to be called the Samsung M9T.
 

Helzy

Active Member
Oct 19, 2017
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I also have a 2tb slim inside my laptop alongside a Samsung PM951 NVME. The seek noises are kinda loud actually. I've been wondering for quite a while why WD hasn't come out with a 2tb 2.5 Red. Also of note, the Seagate model used to be called the Samsung M9T.
Interesting, tried to google this and coming up empty, is there a post or some information you can point me to about the spinpoints being rebranded Barracuda?

Thanks!
 

SDLeary

Member
Aug 4, 2015
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Watch out for the backup drives, depending on what you want your NAS to do. They are good for cold-ish storage, but not hammering them (random writes).

Many of the newer ones are SMR (shingled magnetic recording) rather than PMR, and they do poorly with lots of small writes.

SDLeary
 

Joel

Active Member
Jan 30, 2015
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True statement. I learned the 4tb Seagates I have are SMR. I had an idea to make an array of them; good thing I didn't.
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
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Did Seagate actually transition the ST4000LM016 from PMR to SMR sometime in its lifecycle or were there both PMR & SMR in the market simultaneously from the start? And how do I verify if the ones I have are PMR or SMR?
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
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I saw varied performance of a RAIDZ2 array under FreeBSD, Linux and Solarish which I wondered if this was contributing to the SMR/PMR perspective. Under FreeBSD/FreeNAS they were terrible, under Linux (Ubuntu) they were ok and under Solarish (OmniOS/napp-it) they are decent enough for media storage (circa 1GB/s write & 2GB/s reads from 24 drives in 4 * 6 disk RZ2) although I wouldn't recommend them for high random-IO workloads still.