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Seagate 8TB Archive drives (ST8000AS0002) do work
Just thought I'd pass along in case anyone was curious of the 8TB drives work or not. So far in testing a Pro 6 and an Ultra 6 I have 3 8TB drives in the pro 6 and 2 in the ultra 6 (with another one ...
Sustained write speeds are the big issue with this drive. If you use these drives it is best to set them up as jbod.
Well they were working great on 6.24 and 6.35RC2 but since I was prompted to upgrade to 6.4.0 by the box itself things have went downhill. I tried the 6.4.0 betas and didn't have much luck so I don't know why I thought the official would be any different. I'm getting lots of errors with disks now and whatnot that are permanently registered wth the drive that I know are just errors since they all started happening right after I switched to 6.4.0 (I'm getting ATA errors and lots of command timeouts.)
I'll just end up pulling out one of the 8tb drives and copying all the data back to that and then factory resetting back to 6.2.4 as that seemed very stable. I can't have volumes randomly dropping drives and the software itself ruining the drives by reporting errors that will stay with the drive forever that aren't really errors.
Obviously ATA errors are an issue - and could possibly be firmware related. If so, hopefully that will be fixed.
Though "working great" is perhaps misleading to other readers.
When you write to an SMR drive, the drive needs to re-read and re-write every single track after the one you wrote all the way to the end of the drive. That's because the track data is overlapped on the drive, and when you write a track you destroy the data on the next one. The drive firmware manages this process itself (and the drive has a very big cache to make it easier).
So the drive performs best when the data is only rarely updated (hence the word "Archive"). After a sustained write, the speed will drop - often down to 10 MB/s. There's a review that provides more information here - including some performance graphs: http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb
As the review notes, the drive is not a good fit for RAID applications, and Seagate is quite clear that they do NOT recommend it for RAID.
No one is saying that it won't work. Just that it won't work well. If you do want to use this drive my advice is to use it in JBOD.
well one thing I can tell everyone is that the legacy units do not like the ST8000AS0002 AR15 FW drives... I had two drives that had about 300+ hours of heavy usage on them and after I updated to 6.4.0 I was getting random issues and then I ended up with 304 pending sectors on one drive and the other isn't even recognizable anymore when hooked up to anything.
I don't know if a readynas unit can kill a drive but I've never seen two drives fail that quickly after putting on different firmware... and then not to mention one right after the other. This was on an ultra 6 unit. So far I have bumped it back down to 6.2.4 with another 8TB drive I had and am pulling back data to it as we speak. On my pro 6 I've got 4 of them and all are AR13 FW drives... no errors with them yet. I'll see how 6.4.0 plays out on the pro but I think it really devistated the ultra. I haven't tested 6.4.0 on my rn104 yet but we'll see how that works.
I know you just are trying to help and yes if I want support I should use the appropriate drives in your new units... I get that. Most all of my stuff however is netgear (48 port gigabit switch, 8 port gigabit switch, 2 nighthawk AC routers, I don't know how many nas units and an assortment of other netgear products. I like them, they work.
If I had the cash for enterprise 8TB drives (which will be obsolete in year anyway when they come out with 12TB drives or something like that) but unfortunately for my storage needs I don't have that kind of budget. I'd rather get two units that I can have in multiple places that are redundant than spend the money on one and not have that data anywhere else (this happened not that long ago when my business was burglarized.)
The main reason for my reply was to steer other users away from using ST8000AS0002 with RAID.
Unfortunately HAMR drives aren't on the market yet, and we are close to the limit of what PMR technology can do. So I do understand that the options are limited. I think I'd probably have gone with 6 TB drives and added a second NAS at each location - though of course that is expensive also.
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