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

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wonky

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Jun 15, 2017
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Interesting story:
I picked up 7 of these drives 15 months ago for my NAS, with 6 going into my ZFS pool as a Z2 vdev. These were added to an existing Z2 vdev of 6 x Seagate 2TB drives that were shucked from the Backup Plus Slim externals 33 months ago.

The 2TBs have been flawless all the way. The 4TB drives, on the other hand, started going crazy about 2 months ago after I switched from a custom horizontal-mount assembly to vertical mounting in Icy Dock caddies. Tons of pending sectors reported which would cause ZFS to drop several of the drives, only to clear up after a full disk dd write of zeros, with no bad sectors reported. A few weeks later, this headache would repeat. Old data was fine; new data written in the weeks after the mounting orientation change would occasionally get damaged beyond ZFS' ability to recover.
 

Churchill

Admiral
Jan 6, 2016
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After owning these for some time I have to say the 4TB drives are AWFUL for RAID/StorageSpaces setups. The drives are abysmal writing to them as they spin up to a fast write speed and die off quickly to the low teens in Mb/s writes. Reads are a different animal and they do well there giving fast speed boosts.

If I had to do this all over again, I would definitely spend the money for the 5TB (ST5000LM000) Seagate drives as those have been workhorses. I can tell when my array access those drives as the performance goes through the roof and I get consistent read/write speeds.
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
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I had a lot of initial issues with the 4TB drives (I think you'll find half of this threads earlier posts are my problems) but over the last 6 months or so they have been faultless as a media drives where performance is less critical. I use 24 in 4*6 drive Z2 arrays and see performance in the region of 850MB/s write and reads between 1-2GB/s.
IMHO they make perfectly good media drives where you aren't experiencing a lot of random I/o and instead see typically serial access.
Ive been meaning to buy a few of the 5TB versions to see how they perform but they aren't at the same price level, I paid less than 100usd per 4TB drive and the 5TB are closer to $200 each last time I checked.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Sorry for the thread Necro...

15 months in and they are starting to die...

Had four (out of 32) go in the last couple of weeks. Very typical hard drive death...start showing unrecoverable errors, ZFS Scrub seems to fix it, ATA transport errors go up, reallocated sector count goes up then poof... Might be related to a heat wave a few weeks back.

Luckily SMART monitoring gives warning before they die and RaidZ2/z3 pools have not actually lost data yet. Not worried because everything is replicated and backed up. But I was really hoping to get 3-4 years out of these babies and get past the SSD shortage/price hiccup so that I could eventually replace them with what I really want.

Oh well. Set up on pool recently on 6x 8tb WD Reds after the BB deal. Might be going back to more 3.5 inch drives for a while.
 

iamtelephone

Member
Jan 30, 2017
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Sorry for the thread Necro...

15 months in and they are starting to die...

Had four (out of 32) go in the last couple of weeks. Very typical hard drive death...start showing unrecoverable errors, ZFS Scrub seems to fix it, ATA transport errors go up, reallocated sector count goes up then poof... Might be related to a heat wave a few weeks back.

Luckily SMART monitoring gives warning before they die and RaidZ2/z3 pools have not actually lost data yet. Not worried because everything is replicated and backed up. But I was really hoping to get 3-4 years out of these babies and get past the SSD shortage/price hiccup so that I could eventually replace them with what I really want.

Oh well. Set up on pool recently on 6x 8tb WD Reds after the BB deal. Might be going back to more 3.5 inch drives for a while.
What's the normal temperature of the drives? and is there excessive head parking?

I haven't had mine as long but I've yet to run into any issues.
 

whitey

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Jun 30, 2014
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My 12 are about the same age, no failures yet (knocking on wood). My gear/disks are in an unfinished basement so maybe temps are more forgiving down in my dungeon.
 

BlueFox

Legendary Member Spam Hunter Extraordinaire
Oct 26, 2015
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I have 26 in use here and no failures. They all have very light use (backup file server) and on account of sitting in colocation, drive temps sit at 25C continuously. Been pretty satisfied with them (hard to beat that power usage) and my setup in a Supermicro 216 chassis. Using them behind an Areca 1882i, so I bumped the timeout value a bit, but otherwise everything is as you might expect.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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I'll need to check the temps when I can log in, later tonight when I get home.

One note: all of the failures have been detected during ZFS Scrubs. I don't know if (a) the intense activity of the scrub caused the fault or (b) if the fault happened before but wasn't noticed until the scrub.
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
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Whilst PigLover checks, mine are are 31degrees on my 24 drive array in a SC216 with optimal fan speeds. Running weekly scrubs and haven't seen any issues since my initial array config troubles.
 
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PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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Current temps across all 32 drives range from 29-31 c. Nice normal drive temp. Highest ever (part SMART) was 36c which is a bit high but not really extreme for a drive, lowest is 20.

I'm guessing its not heat, but the fact that the range is so wide over time is probably creating some stress (per the Google drive life study).
 
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Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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No real way to tell the rate of change, if it's 20 --> 36 over 12 hours I would say no issues, if it's a change over 12 minutes then maybe. I would not really suspect temperatures as a major contributing factor but you will never know I Guess.
 

Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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After owning these for some time I have to say the 4TB drives are AWFUL for RAID/StorageSpaces setups. The drives are abysmal writing to them as they spin up to a fast write speed and die off quickly to the low teens in Mb/s writes. Reads are a different animal and they do well there giving fast speed boosts.

If I had to do this all over again, I would definitely spend the money for the 5TB (ST5000LM000) Seagate drives as those have been workhorses. I can tell when my array access those drives as the performance goes through the roof and I get consistent read/write speeds.
I'm glad to here that. I have one in a Backup Plus enclosure that's undergoing a long format prior to being shucked. :)
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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No real way to tell the rate of change, if it's 20 --> 36 over 12 hours I would say no issues, if it's a change over 12 minutes then maybe. I would not really suspect temperatures as a major contributing factor but you will never know I Guess.
I'm guessing more like over 6 months...over a single day more like 1 degree.
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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I'm guessing more like over 6 months...over a single day more like 1 degree.
I would err on the side of suggesting the temp was not the problem.
Could be like some enterprise SAN arrays we had that had more failure than expected, did detailed power,temp,humidity,vibration, etc monitoring, never found a reason, but it just sorted itself out after a good number of replacements, we assume bad batch disks but then the other array serial number + or - 1 in the other DC never showed same issues. No other array in same DC either. Just one of those things...
 

sth

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Oct 29, 2015
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really curious to see perf of these ST5000LM000 vs the 4TB model - keep us informed please.
 

Evan

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Jan 6, 2016
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really curious to see perf of these ST5000LM000 vs the 4TB model - keep us informed please.
By all reports a better drive.
I have some arriving in the next week if there is something specific you want be to test that others have not. As I planned to use them as a backup pool attached to a backup system performance was not really a concern, just space and low heat/power.
 

PigLover

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Jan 26, 2011
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@PigLover is it possible you're seeing failure on the controller that could be causing problems?
Anything is possible. But the four failed drives are on three different systems, so very little common footprint. One system is on X11SRH-f MB SATA through an SM216A backplane, one is Xeon-D with build in LSI2116 connected on a SAS-2 expander backplane. The system with two failed drives has one drive on the MB SATA and the other on an LSI230808i, all direct connect backplanes. Four failed drives, three systems, four separate controllers. Nothing common at all.