8TB Drive Buying Decisions

[Mirabis]

My cloud is NAS, so you are paying more because of it. But check My Book DUO, which is DAS. I am finding these for 530 EUR incl. VAT.

Migrated from Storage Spaces to StableBit Drivepool for backup/media storage and plan to use 2x SSD as drivecache and utilize some of those cheap 8TB SMR drives They have slow writes.. but it's more of a write-once situation

@MyCloud taking drives out, id be cheaper buying OEM drives... at the loss of warranty or just used drives locally

 

[marv]

plan to use 2x SSD as drivecache and utilize some of those cheap 8TB SMR drives They have slow writes.. but it's more of a write-once situation

Seagate archive 8TB goes to long lags, if halted with random writes. It has 12GB PMR space for caching random writes and after this gets filled, they must be put on its place. Disk is divided to 128MB (or 256MB - I am not sure) zones which have to be rewritten if you want to write anything in them. Emptying this cache can take several hours.

For sequential write-once type of use like mkv storage it might be ok. But for other types of use, I would try to avoid these at least till time when there is driver for host-aware type of use (something is coming to Linux 4.7).

 

[Mirabis]

Seagate archive 8TB goes to long lags, if halted with random writes. It has 12GB PMR space for caching random writes and after this gets filled, they must be put on its place. Disk is divided to 128MB (or 256MB - I am not sure) zones which have to be rewritten if you want to write anything in them. Emptying this cache can take several hours.

For sequential write-once type of use like mkv storage it might be ok. But for other types of use, I would try to avoid these at least till time when there is driver for host-aware type of use (something is coming to Linux 4.7).

Yeah, for my situation it'll be fine and saves me quite some money Using 12Gb/s SAS 8TB disks for parity though... cuz that won't work on the archives

 

[IamSpartacus]

Seagate archive 8TB goes to long lags, if halted with random writes. It has 12GB PMR space for caching random writes and after this gets filled, they must be put on its place. Disk is divided to 128MB (or 256MB - I am not sure) zones which have to be rewritten if you want to write anything in them. Emptying this cache can take several hours.

For sequential write-once type of use like mkv storage it might be ok. But for other types of use, I would try to avoid these at least till time when there is driver for host-aware type of use (something is coming to Linux 4.7).

I've seen the on-disk cache reported as being up to 25GB. These drives are def. not meant for a traditional striped array setup but for non-striped arrays (UnRAID/SnapRAID) they are an excellent value especially paired with write cache. I have 18 of them (2 sets of 9) in two different UnRAID servers and they have been rock solid for over a year. Saved me over $2k in disk costs alone.

Some users on the UnRAID forums have done extensive tests with these drives which you can read about here.

 

[Deslok]

At least here in the US there isn't much saving right now to the archive drives, WD is selling the mybook with a single 8tb drive at 250USD Amazon.com: WD 8TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBFJK0080HBK-NESN: Computers & Accessories
and seagate is selling a bare 8tb archive drive for 225 Seagate Archive HDD v2 ST8000AS0002 8TB 5900 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive - Newegg.com with a large enough array that adds up to a decent savings but outside of that the performance disparity doesn't seem worth the savings.

 

[IamSpartacus]

At least here in the US there isn't much saving right now to the archive drives, WD is selling the mybook with a single 8tb drive at 250USD Amazon.com: WD 8TB My Book Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 - WDBFJK0080HBK-NESN: Computers & Accessories
and seagate is selling a bare 8tb archive drive for 225 Seagate Archive HDD v2 ST8000AS0002 8TB 5900 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive - Newegg.com with a large enough array that adds up to a decent savings but outside of that the performance disparity doesn't seem worth the savings.

For those who are set on running a striped array and don't care about large drives with no warranty support, you are correct the difference is negligible.

 

[William]

I urge you to do more reading. Consumer SSD are not tested the same as Enterprise SSD and thus their rating are not apples to apples. Enterprise SSD are as fast as consumer doing the 'same test' if not faster yet consumer SSD are not nearly as fast as enterprise SSD when doing enterprise tests.

That is very true. Plus consider just what workloads the SSD was designed for.
I have been using an Intel P3700 300GB NVMe PCIe SSD drive for booting on my main rig for about a year now. Sure it works just fine but I have had a chance to several other newer PCIe SSD's that are tuned for OS/Gaming setups, the dif is very noticeable with the new drives.

 

[Blinding]

Keep in mind that the Seagate Archive drives are not suitable for RAID. This is because of the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) and the way tracks are written. People have tried them and they work OK until you need to run a rebuild. The SMR drives can't take the pounding from a rebuild and eventually hang.

I have the Seagate archive 8TB in a NAS but it is not using RAID and has been OK. I want to mirror it to another NAS but now that the drive prices have shot up I guess that will have to wait.

Hello,

• HGST Ultrastar He8 SAS 12 Gbps (OF23268), 8TB for €360,- each [NEW] Oem / sealed (€519 retail);
• OEM Seagate ST8000NM0055 8TB 24/7 V5 Enterprise for €260,- each (€429 retail)
  
• Seagate NAS HDD, 8 TB New + Warranty for €310,- (€444,50- retail)
  
• WD Red 8 TB Helium for €337,90 NEW + warranty
• Seagate Archive HDD v2 -- 8TB for €238,90 each NEW + warranty

 

[IamSpartacus]

Keep in mind that the Seagate Archive drives are not suitable for RAID. This is because of the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) and the way tracks are written. People have tried them and they work OK until you need to run a rebuild. The SMR drives can't take the pounding from a rebuild and eventually hang.

I have the Seagate archive 8TB in a NAS but it is not using RAID and has been OK. I want to mirror it to another NAS but now that the drive prices have shot up I guess that will have to wait.

They work fine in non-striped arrays (UnRAID/SnapRAID). I have 8 of them in two different servers (so 16 total) and I've never had a problem with a rebuild.

 

[Mirabis]

They work fine in non-striped arrays (UnRAID/SnapRAID). I have 8 of them in two different servers (so 16 total) and I've never had a problem with a rebuild.

You have them as parity disks as well (snap raid)?


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[IamSpartacus]

You have them as parity disks as well (snap raid)?


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I'm not using them in SnapRAID myself. I have two UnRAID servers and yes I'm using them as parity drives (dual parity) as well.

 

[rubylaser]

There are other SnapRAID USES using them as parity drives without issues as well.

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