Seagate Archive 8TB SATA III SMR Hard Drive $235 at Newegg

[neo]

Seagate Archive HDD v2 ST8000AS0002 8TB 5900 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

$260 - $25 off with coupon code VCO2015BTS (Exp 8/31)

 

[Patriot]

@neo, I still wouldn't Capacity is great, but the performance anomalies are terrifying.
Give it another generation.

 

[Diavuno]

After reading this article I'd like to sway away too...

However, the cost/GB is half of other enterprise drives. and leading the pack in storage/bay.

I'm going to buy up some for my home server as that is well under 20GB write bursts. my home box is 95% read... all my home VMs sit on some faster/smaller SAS drives.

 

[Chuckleb]

I have a couple that I use for backups, rsync targets. They work just fine for that. Would work well as a crashplan target drive too. Great for backups. Good price as well.

 

[Dajinn]

@neo, I still wouldn't Capacity is great, but the performance anomalies are terrifying.
Give it another generation.

What performance anomalies?

 

[Patriot]

What performance anomalies?

Well anything but sequential writes causes a re-write of a 256MB block due to the SMR patterning... This will create a pause on inflow while the re-write is done.

If the filesystem is zone aware it can write to non-smr sectors until there is enough data for a full chunk... if not you will be re-writing often resulting in single digit performance.

 

[Deslok]

is there a way to use a 256mb allocation unit?(I know i don't see this in windows by default) and would that help any

 

[Patriot]

is there a way to use a 256mb allocation unit?(I know i don't see this in windows by default) and would that help any

It won't matter if the filesystem is not zone aware and aligned properly to the zoning ...
EXT4 can be made zone aware btw...

 

[Deslok]

It won't matter if the filesystem is not zone aware and aligned properly to the zoning ...
EXT4 can be made zone aware btw...

Unfortunatly I have to live in the windows world currently, I was thinking about ReFS on Server 2012 for one of our tennats.

 

[Patriot]

Unfortunatly I have to live in the windows world currently, I was thinking about ReFS on Server 2012 for one of our tennats.

If you can't even do linux network storage stick to non-SMR unless you do purely sequential writes.

 

[nitrobass24]

Interesting info Patriot. Zone Aware filesystems, I am wondering if this might be a good use-case for my Syno. Im on 5x4TB and out of space. Could put 4 of these in RAID5 and almost double capacity and put a 1TB SDD as a caching tier in front of it.

 

[Deslok]

If you can't even do linux network storage stick to non-SMR unless you do purely sequential writes.

Me personally? yes I can, the people who have to manage it after I set it up? not happening and I don't need the support headache, hopefully SMR seems more mainstream support from both the raid controller vendors and microsoft next year.

 

[Patriot]

Interesting info Patriot. Zone Aware filesystems, I am wondering if this might be a good use-case for my Syno. Im on 5x4TB and out of space. Could put 4 of these in RAID5 and almost double capacity and put a 1TB SDD as a caching tier in front of it.

http://events.linuxfoundation.org/sites/events/files/slides/SMR-LinuxConUSA-2014.pdf

Theoretically with enough SSD cache you could cover up the issues of SMR.
I want to prove this with a ZFS setup. I have 12 8TB SMRs to play with...

 

[Diavuno]

depending on the daily injestion and how much change you may not notice that its SMR...

+10GB/day
or little changes and I dont think you'll notice.