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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 ...
Hi
I have a RN104 NASS. I want to replace my existing drives with 4 x 8Tb Drives.
Does this NASS have any restrictions which prevent this?
I have 4 Drives on my Main Computer and all I do is a "Exact Copy" then "Incremental" of them thereafter - SWo effectively it is Drive 1 to NASS Drive No 1 etc.
Your help will be much appreciated.
Thanks
Albert
mar2251@yahoo.com
mar2251 wrote:
Hi
I have a RN104 NASS. I want to replace my existing drives with 4 x 8Tb Drives.
Does this NASS have any restrictions which prevent this?
I have 4 Drives on my Main Computer and all I do is a "Exact Copy" then "Incremental" of them thereafter - SWo effectively it is Drive 1 to NASS Drive No 1 etc.
Your help will be much appreciated.
Thanks
Albert
mar2251@yahoo.com
ST8000AS0002 isn't on the HCL, so Netgear can/will deny support if you use them. That said,they are putting in some adjustments to handle these drives better in the NAS.
Seagate, and all reviews of these drives that I've seen are quite clear these drives are not suitable for RAID. Of course they've said that about other drives (desktop and green) in the past, but SMR is a bit different. The underlying technology is very well matched to archival, but is not so well matched to general use.
Clearly some end-users will (and are) ignoring that, and treating them as if they were general purpose drives. If their usage is similar to archival, they will get reasonable results. If they are downloading torrents, upgrading live databases, or similar stuff, they likely will run into serious performance issues.
Your case seems to fit this archival usage quite well. You'd set up each disk as jbod, and then copy the data over. You can use frontview backup, robocopy, teracopy, or some similar tool to migrate the data. I'd suggest robocopy or teracopy myself (teracopy allowing you to verify the copies) You will need enough scratch space to store at least one of the drives.
Perhaps off-load the drive that has the least amount of stuff to a USB drive, then shift that to the NAS. Call that one "A". Tnen copy B to the NAS, and move B to the NAS. Copy C to that volume,... Then copy the USB temporary storage last. The sustained write performance of these drives is very variable, so migrating the data could take a long time.
Another option (perhaps better) is to make the first drive a 6 TB NAS drive, and use SMR for the other three. Then keep your 4th SMR drive as a spare. That gives you one drive which is well suited for non-archival applications.
I'd suggest leaving snapshots off, and avoiding balancing and defragmenting these drives.
You have no real world experience Stephen unless you have SMR hard drives. You're just spouting what you've heard and read about.
Performance is perfectly acceptable on my unit running raid. I just added the 6th drive to my Pro 6 and am happy with performance. I can run parallels off of the drive with no slowdowns while copying data to and from the device.
The only time I do have issues is when the box locks up because of the firmware and given the amount of other people who have lockup issues it's not my drives causing the lockups. My ultra 6 at home hardcore locked up so when I get home I'll have to restart that and that just has a plain 6TB WD Green in it. I'm going to have to use that model in my ultra 6 because that one does not like the 8TB drives (no idea why but any 8TB drive I put in it, it manages to kill somehow... perhaps power supply issue, not sure.) Figured I'd go with green 6TB drives.
I agree. The problem is definitely with 6.4.x.
I had 2x8TB in an Ultra4 with 6.4.0 and it was a nightmare. Multiple command timeouts and repeated dropping.
When I downgraded to 6.2.4 and factory reset it was fine. Copying was very slow (but I suspect this was, as StephenB says, due to the drive internally re-writing to the end of the disk) but no more drops/command timeouts.
Adding a 3rd 8TB to the JBOD structure and copying another 6TB was suprisingly fast, only 48h. Whilst it will never be as fast as a NAS 7200rpm disk, it's not bad at all.
My advice - 6.4.x is still broken for SMR drives (and the problem is probably in the Linux core - I posted in another thread) but 6.2.4/5 is fine.
Kind regards,
Andy
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