5tb seagate 2.5" $100

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Stereodude

Active Member
Feb 21, 2016
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I'm going to say Yes*

2015 article discussing 8TB disks:
Seagate Archive HDD Review (8TB) | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews


Obviously there are caveats to this transfer, sequential write is high, random write is low. Makes sense on how SMR drives are built.
The IOMeter results don't tell us anything useful because we don't know how much data they wrote. They specifically said:
Each drive was tested within its burst limits with tests taking no longer than 65 seconds per internal
So, I'm going with no*. Did you miss this line?
The results from this scenario weren't a huge surprise since we had built it out knowing the limitations and performance qualities of this SMR HDD. We found large sustained backup tasks to take longer than a traditional PMR HDD, averaging about 30MB/s.
 

Churchill

Admiral
Jan 6, 2016
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Saw that line and saw that they used the following as baseline:

" We created four backup jobs, each of a MySQL database VM we use in testing that is roughly 400GB in size."

I'm talking about RAID of these disks and their performance in a RAID array, you seem to be talking about single disk drives in a single USB connection. Is performance better in a single drive writing larger sequential data on SMR? yes. Random data such as in a RAID array, I see no.

Until I find some metrics on a RAID of 5TB 2.5" disks shucked from these USB drives and used in a RAID array I can only use the metrics that have the limits of what is known about SMR and my personal experiene with 4/5TB 2.5" shucked drives in a RAID array.

I see no point in continuing this discussion as we will never come to consensus @Stereodude. I'm bowing out of this thread.
 

Stereodude

Active Member
Feb 21, 2016
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Is performance better in a single drive writing larger sequential data on SMR? yes. Random data such as in a RAID array, I see no.
*sigh* SMR drives have worse performance than PMR drives in pretty much every performance metric.

There is no still no evidence that the drives are SMR. They don't perform like a SMR drive should.
 

arglebargle

H̸̖̅ȩ̸̐l̷̦͋l̴̰̈ỏ̶̱ ̸̢͋W̵͖̌ò̴͚r̴͇̀l̵̼͗d̷͕̈
Jul 15, 2018
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Everything Seagate 2.5" external 5TB+ is shingled, they started transitioning in 2015/2016. 4TB external backup drives from 2015/2016 batches may be PMR, 2017 batches and onward are SMR.

Largest shuckable non-SMR 2.5" external? : DataHoarder

There's nothing wrong with these SMR drives for normal use, but when you stuff 8 of them into an array and start hitting them with a non-sequential workload you're going to have a bad time.

There's a ton of info on SMR/PMR Seagate 2.5" externals here as well:
https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...kup-plus-4tb-drive-cheap-2-5-4tb-drives.9539/
 
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arglebargle

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Jul 15, 2018
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They are SMR, I trust these guys: Seagate Introduces BarraCuda 2.5” HDDs with Up to 5 TB Capacity

That article also goes some way to explaining why they might not perform as badly as SMR should.

That said, I have 8 across a couple of TB enclosures with ZFS and they work great, no complaints a year on. If you want to give me a non destructive benchmark to run then I'll happily run it.
Awesome, thanks for the information!

With 8 drives plus the ZFS write cache it might actually be tricky to design a pathological workload that isn't flat out absurd. You could try a random write test over a really large area (each drive has I think 20GB of PMR cache, and based on the results from this paper they see performance start to noticeably drop relative to PMR drives with a random rewrite workload over a 56GB sized LBA range) and see what happens to performance as you move from 50GB toward 1TB. They're using a cache SSD with their SMR drive though, so you may see performance drop sooner if you're just using HDDs and RAM.

Now I'm actually interested, when I have a bit more lab money I might pick up 4 of these and characterize an array with and without SSDs. It's not like bulk media server storage needs a ton of random rewriting most of the time.

One more question-- have you had any issues with drives dropping from the array? That's one thing I've seen mentioned a few times re: these 2.5" drives, people seem to have problems with them dropping from the array if the drive hits an unreadable sector so it can run its own recovery routine.
 
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gregsachs

Active Member
Aug 14, 2018
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The ones I got today were definitely labeled Barracude, fwiw. About 5 minutes per to shuck them.
 

canta

Well-Known Member
Nov 26, 2014
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They are SMR, I trust these guys: Seagate Introduces BarraCuda 2.5” HDDs with Up to 5 TB Capacity

That article also goes some way to explaining why they might not perform as badly as SMR should.

That said, I have 8 across a couple of TB enclosures with ZFS and they work great, no complaints a year on. If you want to give me a non destructive benchmark to run then I'll happily run it.
I have thos 5tb smr drive since dec 2018.. when was $95.
Running on zfs raidz1 5 drives.
I posted my quick result and cockpit ui web management https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...5tb-2-5-external-drive-95-costco.22786/page-2

Not fast as my old 12 hdd of *ehem* seagate baracuda 7200, but... not very slow...

One observation: hdd temp is a bit high when crunching. I usually lower down rpm for fan that related to hdd lication. For this drives i set the max speed of 140mm fan.

One thing that i do to make sure seagete not dying soon since power saving is very aggressive for external drive: SET apm to 250 all rhe time. I did simple observstion by recording with my phone audio to listen power saving kick off , clicking sound . It is nasty. During quick testing . Clicking sound always happens 30 sec to 60 sec that lower down the rate. And load cycle from smartctl growing very rapidly.
Set to 250 to apm and ny experience with this drive going snoothly.

Yeah slow than regular pmr of my 3tb barracuda, but accepeted due in 2.5 form factor and price range since i cramp wverything to small mini . Cable management? Haha.. does not exit on this.


Edited... alas... i bought one again .$83 total... can not resist ...
 
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