Amazon 8TB External Seagate Backup Drive $179.99

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MystPhysX

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The STEB8000100 are going to go for 169.99 on Newegg Black Friday. Anyone know the difference?
 

keybored

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The STEB8000100 are going to go for 169.99 on Newegg Black Friday. Anyone know the difference?
STEB8000100 is a plain Seagate Expansion. STEL8000100 (listed in the OP) is a Seagate Backup Plus Hub, which has a USB hub and also includes 200GB of cloud storage. If you're after the drive that's inside then it doesn't matter which one you get.
 
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MystPhysX

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Went for this one. It's a much better deal seeing as Amazon will ship it and handle customs for me.
 

T_Minus

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How are these "new" Seagates working in RAID ??? I've heard SOOOOOO MANY bad experiences I've been afraid to even touch a Seagate.
 

MystPhysX

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Bad experiences with the 8TBs? From what I know it was the 1.5TB and 3TB drives that were abysmal. My 4TBs are going strong.
 

T_Minus

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That's why I said "new".... :) I think they wer 1-3TB for sure jsut not sure exactly the drive that screwed up and died, and by drive I mean 3x needing replaced, destroying a raid6!!! (CC: @ShepsCrook )
 

MystPhysX

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Unfortunately I cannot seem to find failure rates for the HDD inside. I'm hoping someone else will chime in.
 

keybored

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These 8TB Archive drives will choke under sustained writes. I have two of these (internals, not shucked externals) and I use them for backups. I've seen them go to 0 Bytes/sec (yes, zero) for minutes at a time before recovering back to a reasonable speed. Some RAID setups might not be too happy about that.
 

T_Minus

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@keybored thanks for providing that, great info for all to know and be aware of when buying them.

For now I'm sticking to my WD RED and WD RE :) as well as ENT variants of Seagate I've had 0 problems with.
 

GladLock96

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Nov 8, 2016
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I shucked several 5TB Seagate drives since they were only sale a few years back, just like these 8TB drives, and put them in a 5 Bay Synology RAID. Within two weeks, 2 of them died....within 4 weeks, the rest of them died. Without the warranty I was screwed - several $$$ was lost on that project by trying to save a few cents. Lesson learned - don't shuck!
 

MystPhysX

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Oh I'm just going to use it as an external backup solution. I know that they put the bottom of the barrel drives in the external enclosures lol.

Thank you for the warning though :)

edit - here's a freeNAS thread discussing the drive: Seagate 8TB Archive Drive in FreeNAS?
 
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T_Minus

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oh @MystPhysX within the first 5 posts we already have their arrogant admin spouting his bullshit about "all he knows", sorry I had to stop there. Really? He comments once, others share their opinion and then he has to weigh-in on "already knowing" and providing more info obviously done from research AFTER his first post... FreeNAS forum and JockItch rub me the wrong wrong way, sorry but that guy is a huge tool and makes their site pretty much unreadable!!

/end rant of jockitch
 

MystPhysX

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Hehehe okay

The gist of the thread is that they don't recommend using it in any type of RAID save for a few setups that appear to be doing fine. The write is low, averaging about 30MB/s with bursts to 170-190MB/s. The read is a lot better at an average of 150-ish.

It should be perfect as offline backup, which is what I'm going to use it for.
 
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push3r

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Well, I can tell you guys my story. I shucked 6 x 5TB SMR (shingle) drives from that Amazon Seagate Expansion External HDD deals back a year ago. I have been using these guys in both Illumos and BSD (Freenas) ZFS. I finally switched to Freenas 9.10 which has been running for about a year now. The SMR drives are installed in a SuperMicro chassis. This Freenas box has: mirror zpool, decent amount of RAM (64GB), fast Intel SSD for ZIL, and 10GbE SFP+ nics.

I use this system at work for all of the following workloads running simultaneously: lab/dev VMware VMs, Veeam backup repository, and SMB shares. I do Veeam incremental backup every 3 hours and full once a month of our live Production environment to it. Additionally, I would do Veeam replication and backup copy job from it too. So, a fair amount of data is moving through it all the time.

It's been running just fine for about a year and just recently one drive developed 16 bad sectors which ZFS/FreeNas had no problem dealing with in terms of marking them bad and continued to hum along. I have not even replaced that drive yet, and my Freenas ZFS box is running along just fine. Scrub found no issue with my pool. I will replace that hard drive soon though.

As for speed, like everyone said, once the cache is used up, it can be slow down to around 30 MB/s and the speed is inconsistent where no logic would make sense. I would sometime fill it all the way up above 80% due to monthly full backup, and this would slow it down quite a bit as ZFS doesn't like it above 80% capacity.

Anyway, as you can see, these shingle hard drives are actually not freaking bad at all. You just have to be aware of the drives' limitation and not expecting them to work like the normal 720o rpm drives.

I'm planning to get a single 8TB one for home backup. I don't care about speed as the backup will run overnight in the background anyway.
 
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