Seagate Archive HDD for bulk storage

[rubylaser]

Sure, you could just use dd to write out a bunch of temp files with dd if you are comfortable using it (if you aren't used to it, just forget it, as I don't want you to accidentally wipe out your array by feeding it the wrong command).

 

[Deslok]

I'd also like to see some tests out of crystal disk mark against a mounted share with maybe a 1gb/4gb transfer size comparison.

 

[Churchill]

We've done some exhaustive testing over on the UnRAID forums and have found that using these disks as both data, parity, and backup are just fine for moderate use*. Allocate the drive using the "FILL" option in UnRAID so you fill the drive up quickly and then move onto the next one has been the best option vs spreading the data out over many disks.

Lots of testing:
Seagate 8TB Shingled Drives in UnRAID


44 page discussion on the topic further:
Seagate’s first shingled hard drives now shipping: 8TB for just $260

*Would I use these in a massive RAID writing every single day millions of times? Never. SMR tech isn't designed for this and these drives work very well for Cold Storage and Backup, not for daily use.

 

[rubylaser]

We've done some exhaustive testing over on the UnRAID forums and have found that using these disks as both data, parity, and backup are just fine for moderate use*. Allocate the drive using the "FILL" option in UnRAID so you fill the drive up quickly and then move onto the next one has been the best option vs spreading the data out over many disks.

Lots of testing:
Seagate 8TB Shingled Drives in UnRAID

44 page discussion on the topic further:
Seagate’s first shingled hard drives now shipping: 8TB for just $260

*Would I use these in a massive RAID writing every single day millions of times? Never. SMR tech isn't designed for this and these drives work very well for Cold Storage and Backup, not for daily use.

Thanks for the link. I think these disks will work well in a non-striped RAID setup like UnRAID or SnapRAID, but I think performance, especially as these disks get filled up will be bad. And, a reshape (like adding a disk or changing RAID levels in mdadm will be glacially slow).

As a sidenote, I know UnRAID isn't super fast, but those average observed speeds from the link of 671 KB/s and roughly 40 MB/s on larger transfers are slow. That would make doing a large file transfer to an array of these disks terribly slow. I would assume that an SSD cache would be added to the array to soften the speed penalty on file transfers to the array.

To me these disks make sense as inexpensive data disks, but I wouldn't even use them as parity disks even with snapshot RAID like SnapRAID.

 

[DaveBC]

I got four of the Seagate Backup Plus Hub 8TB USB 3.0 drives on boxing week for moving some old backups off a RAID10 of 12x 2TB SAS drives. Crystaldiskinfo reports the model to be ST8000AS0002, archive drives.

I expected them to be slow, but some of them are writing at an unexpectedly fast rate.
1st drive, sequential writes >170MB/s 4K random 7MB/s. That 4K random makes no sense, right? Some kind of caching going on? All drives are set for quick removal in disk management.
2nd drive at first sequential writes ~30MB/s 4K random 0.16MB/s. This is the kind of performance I expected.
2nd drive after about a day performance was similar to 1st drive. Garbage collection, persistent cache maybe doing its job, but still seems too good.
3rd drive sat powered on for ~five days. Sequential writes ~30MB/s 4K random 0.16MB/s.
4th drive same as the 3rd. Haven't written anything to it besides test data.

I'm currently waiting for the last TB of data to move to the 3rd drive. Windows copy process 20-24MB/s reported by windows explorer.

Has anyone else witnessed this?