Seagate Backup Plus 4TB Drive - Cheap 2.5" 4TB drives

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Churchill

Admiral
Jan 6, 2016
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I know these are bulk USB drives and not meant to do what it is that I'm looking them to do but I was seriously hoping for more than 15MB/s write time with these guys.

Glad it's not just me, these drives will be just fine for their intended use: Backup of a Backup. Once the initial backup is finished (6TB 4 days and counting...) the modicum amount of data I'm trucking across won't be that bad.
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
379
91
28
Single drive on a test bench I see 60-130MB/s. In an array, striped, mirrors they fall apart.
 

Churchill

Admiral
Jan 6, 2016
838
213
43
These drives are PMR correct? Not shingled at all?


Single disk I noticed great performance, this RAID 5 of 4 disks, writing TB's of data, and they've gone to complete shit.
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
379
91
28
Same here. My understanding of all the marketing, technical and PR around these drives is PMR.
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
379
91
28
making a bit of progress now...this is without my ZIL/L2ARC P3700's and only 32GB RAM.

Code:
                              capacity     operations    bandwidth
pool                       alloc   free   read  write   read  write
-------------------------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
rpool                      30.8G  6.24G      0      0      0      0
  c4t2d0s0                 30.8G  6.24G      0      0      0      0
-------------------------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
tank                       7.51G  87.0T  16.1K      0  2.02G      0
  raidz2                   1.90G  21.7T  5.05K      0   647M      0
    c9t5000C5009B3B610Bd0      -      -  3.18K      0   102M      0
    c9t5000C5009B5AAE9Ad0      -      -  3.18K      0   102M      0
    c9t5000C5009B626FD9d0      -      -  5.05K      0   162M      0
    c9t5000C5009BA23EB0d0      -      -  1.87K      0  59.7M      0
    c9t5000C5009BAC7953d0      -      -  1.87K      0  59.7M      0
    c9t5000C5009BB76B3Ed0      -      -  5.05K      0   162M      0
  raidz2                   1.87G  21.7T  3.92K      0   501M      0
    c9t5000C5009BB7A250d0      -      -  3.92K      0   125M      0
    c9t5000C5009BB7CECDd0      -      -  3.92K      0   125M      0
    c9t5000C5009BB83DB3d0      -      -  3.92K      0   125M      0
    c9t5000C5009BB99608d0      -      -      0      0      0      0
    c9t5000C5009BB9D953d0      -      -      0      0      0      0
    c9t5000C5009BBB8B76d0      -      -  3.92K      0   125M      0
  raidz2                   1.86G  21.7T  3.19K      0   409M      0
    c9t5000C5009BBBF0EFd0      -      -      0      0      0      0
    c9t5000C5009BF4E02Bd0      -      -      0      0      0      0
    c9t5000C5009BF6B40Ed0      -      -  3.19K      0   102M      0
    c9t5000C5009BFFAE40d0      -      -  3.19K      0   102M      0
    c9t5000C5009D0E4FFAd0      -      -  3.19K      0   102M      0
    c9t5000C5009D102D5Ad0      -      -  3.19K      0   102M      0
  raidz2                   1.87G  21.7T  3.98K      0   509M      0
    c9t5000C5008B90D510d0      -      -      0      0      0      0
    c9t5000C5009B458718d0      -      -      0      0      0      0
    c9t5000C5009B5A959Ad0      -      -  3.98K      0   127M      0
    c9t5000C5009BB7DA39d0      -      -  3.98K      0   127M      0
    c9t5000C5009BB9EDFDd0      -      -  3.98K      0   127M      0
    c9t5000C5009BC0C2DDd0      -      -  3.98K      0   127M      0
-------------------------  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----  -----
This is with a iozone test from within Napp-it.
 

ruffy91

Member
Oct 6, 2012
71
11
8
Switzerland
Has anyone had them in a HP DL G6 or G7?
Do the Fans ramp up?
On mine they just start at 20% and go steady up to 100% after 5 minutes.
ACU on the P410i shows correct temps (~24°C), but iLO shows "storage" temperature as 50°C (and rising) and the threshold is 60°C which explains the behaviour.
Is there a possibility to change the threshold temperature?
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
379
91
28
@ruffy91 these drives run very cool and don't need much air flow to keep cool, even in the sealed USB caddies they maxed out at 55degrees under pretty arduous testing. Id look to get the temps under control rather than change your threshold values.

@Churchill They are all over the place. Disabling cache to purely bench the raw disk array performance and I can see the 4*6 Raix Z2 array read at 110MB/s, writes are at a more reasonable 1.5gbps so its a read issue. This is under Napp-it. Under Freeness I had really crap write performance and Im pretty sure it was so poor FreeNAS would eject the disks from he array causing all manner of issues.

Ive tested them in two systems with similar results. Im curious why no-one else has confirmed poor perf though.
 

whitey

Moderator
Jun 30, 2014
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Ive tested them in two systems with similar results. Im curious why no-one else has confirmed poor perf though.
I see ok performance w/ slog/l2arc cache devices in the mix (trusty hussl devs), nothing to scoff at here, I've seen enterprises w/ less-performant stg than this unfortunately and paid GOBS more $$$.

Once again I personally would NOT use these for anything but cold stg w/out cache devices, I think you had pretty respectable performance if memory serves me correct at some point w/ cache devices in the mix...albeit it not 'as good' as you would have liked and those devices could be put to much better use (P3700's).

WARNING, REAL WORLD TESTS, none of this synthetic/optimized 'show me the through the roof numbers' wink wink that you'll RARELY see in a production environment.
 

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sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
379
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Absolutely right, with certain types of read access (parallel & deeper queue depth) I see up to 2.5gbps, from the example output above
Code:
tank                       7.51G  87.0T  16.1K      0  2.02G
Reading a single stream, say a Bluray iso the pool appears limited to 110MB/s so its not particularly quick to say sync a bluray movie to another storage pool however, Im still faffing and testing. I'm planning on doing some benchmarking this weekend to see how it scales with multiple Plex streams etc. Write access is generally fine under Napp-it with up to 2gbps easily achieved.
I had a miserable experience under FreeNAS 9.10-U4 though but have no idea why, perhaps theres some underlying differences between the ZFS imp,imitation in BSD for FreeNAS and OmniOS that Napp-it relies on. Also Linux/Ubuntu was different again.
 

whitey

Moderator
Jun 30, 2014
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What did Open-ZFS (Linux) implementation show...somewhere in the middle? I will tell you this...I'd have to dig deep but I had some threads around here where 'every now and again' OmniOS would just 'sh|t the bed' on me either w/ a network stack issue/buffer error, or kernel panic delivering 10G NFS to my vSphere cluster and YES I did have all the suggested TCP buffer tunables w/ dladm implemented. This was OmniOS 008-014 versions IIRC.

I'll take stability over speed any day of the week and that is why I settled in on FreeNAS, never a hiccup and the replication in a web UI sure is nice. Was growing tired of managing scripted ZFS send/recv's :-D
 
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Paul Roland

Member
Jul 10, 2015
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Hi folks, been a while since this finding...
Any failed drives around ? from the owners, need a true AFR because nobody trusts Seagate on that regard.
 

Churchill

Admiral
Jan 6, 2016
838
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Hi folks, been a while since this finding...
Any failed drives around ? from the owners, need a true AFR because nobody trusts Seagate on that regard.
No failed drive, just handfuls of disappointment in write performance.

These drives are slow as molasses in winter.