Just loaded readynas 516 with these drives (ST8000AS0002)

Nice. So they fit properly in the drive trays and in the drive bays?

Not sure how well these drives will hold up in RAID use, but if you store important data primarily on the NAS, please backup the data. If you run into issues using disks that are not on the compatibility list support will be unable to help.

As far as fitting in the bays I had to shave off one of the plastic nubs in the middle of the quick change tray because the hard drives did not have all the holes down the side of it other then that they fit great. So far it says the X-Raid is working good.

Ah, we'll never add those disks to the compatibility list then. There are a few different high capacity hard disks out there that have unusual physical layouts.

It'd be interesting to hear how they stand up anyway, since there will be other SMR drives introduced.

Historically SMR drives have been viewed as particularly sensitive to vibration, and of course this model has that workload spec.

Hopefully over time there will be newer disk models in these capacities with conventional physical layouts (in terms of where the holes are etc.).

mdgm wrote:
Hopefully over time there will be newer disk models in these capacities with conventional physical layouts (in terms of where the holes are etc.).

Yes.

FWIW, modifying the disk tray carries some risk (the plastic nubs are there for a reason...), so its not something I'd recommend..

I did put screw at the bottom of the tray after cutting the middle nub away to hold the drive more secure. Unfortunately I really need the space the 8tb drives give other wise I would have not made this move. I already maxed out my space with the 4tb drives so might as well go big as I can. I have been using readynas system for a very long time and never had a problem using a drive that was not on the spec list. I have 3 nas systems and one has speced drives and the other 2 dont. And the funny thing is the one with drives on the list to use is the one that has failed on me before. I have to say the 516 is so much faster then the readynas pro pioneer edition I have.

These particular drives are designed for archival / cold storage. So they might behave quite differently from the normal 4-6 TB NAS or enterprise drive.

Interestingly, when you look at the spec sheet, it's rated for 24x7 operation.

The difference between this drive and the Enterprise Capacity drive is much lower workload rate limit, lower MTBF and lower Non-recoverable Read Errors per Bits Read rating

And of course the footnote:

Archive HDDs are not intended for surveillance or NAS applications, and you may experience lower performance in these environments. For these applications, Seagate NAS HDDs and Seagate Surveillance HDDs are suggested for better performance and reliability.

The reliability comment is interesting, though of course it might not have anything behind it.

I think the lower workload spec is the key here; AFAIK it is a new specification for Seagate. I haven't seen it on other datasheets, so I'm thinking they created it for this particular drive line. So it could have quite a bit of analysis/thought behind it.

180 TB per year is probably fine for many users. But if you want to stay within it, you will need to be thoughtful on disk maintenance (disk tests, defrag, balance, and scrub). Just installing them one at a time (as the OP did) puts 40-48 TB of workload on the first drive installed (depending on what else is in the system when the first drive is added). Each scrub adds another 8TB of workload for each drive. RAID of course increases the I/O for writing (bad for workload), but it also spreads both the reads and writes are evenly across all the drives (which could be good).