8TB ST8000NM0055 with ReadyNAS Pro 6 - so far, so good

[onrofla]

My report:

One week in, RNDP6000 (no suffix on label) Pro 6, with 6x ST8000NM0055 (f/w SN02) - working fine.

This drive is NOT on the HCL, repeat my foolhardy example at your own risk, blah, blah, blah.

RAM was upgarded to 4G (2x Kingston KVR800D2N6K2, (discontinued)).

Had installed OS 6.6.1 before doing the factory reset with new drives in place.

The sync took ~48 hours in the background, with concurrent backups (6TB over that period) running.

I'm assuming I already had the newest BIOS on this thing:

root@pro2:~# dmesg | grep BIOS

...
[    0.000000] DMI: To Be Filled By O.E.M. To Be Filled By O.E.M./To be filled by O.E.M., BIOS 080014  07/26/2010

These 8TB Disks suffer from the annoying whine at idle, as reported on other threads.

Seagate says a new drive f/w will be realeased soon (March 2017 or thereafter).  Noise will be fixed by what they say is an adjustment to "step sweep seek value" in firmware.

Go to https://apps1.seagate.com/downloads/request.html

and enter your drive's serial number to see if the f/w is released.  The version we're after should be newer than SN02, perhaps SN03+.

I hope someone finds this useful.

~37T formatted capacity:

root@pro2:~# df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev             10M  4.0K   10M   1% /dev
/dev/md0        4.0G  415M  3.3G  12% /
tmpfs           2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /dev/shm
tmpfs           2.0G  5.9M  2.0G   1% /run
tmpfs           986M  996K  985M   1% /run/lock
tmpfs           2.0G     0  2.0G   0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/md127       37T  8.6T   28T  24% /data
/dev/md127       37T  8.6T   28T  24% /apps
/dev/md127       37T  8.6T   28T  24% /home

[StephenB]

Thx for posting your experience with these drives.  It'll help inform other folks when they are looking at drive upgrades.

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@onrofla wrote:

One week in, RNDP6000 (no suffix on label) Pro 6, with 6x ST8000NM0055 (f/w SN02) - working fine.

This drive is NOT on the HCL, repeat my foolhardy example at your own risk, blah, blah, blah.

---

They aren't updating the HCL anymore - I've recommended selecting disks from current enterprise-class or NAS-purposed drives for some time now. Tracking down old drives from the HCL makes little sense to me.

I see you are also running OS 6.  There are expansion limits with OS 4.2 firmware that start to get in the way if you are using 4 TB or larger drives.  Switching to OS 6 is a reasonable solution, especially if you are out of warranty.

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@onrofla wrote:

...These 8TB Disks suffer from the annoying whine at idle, as reported on other threads.

Seagate says a new drive f/w will be realeased soon (March 2017 or thereafter).  Noise will be fixed by what they say is an adjustment to "step sweep seek value" in firmware.

---

Some posters here seem to have gotten updated firmware already.  "March 2017" is now of course, but if there is delay you might push Seagate a bit.

[vorwrath]

Did you get any further with this? Got the same issue with these ST8000NM0055 drives whirring constantly when idle, and there doesn't seem to be any newer firmware available.

[onrofla]

I had just checked yesterday, and still nothing on the Seagate f/w download site for my serial #.

When I spoke to Seagate, they admitted there was new f/w for their other 8T models, but none yet for the "NM0055" specifically.

I've also upgraded CPU to quad core X3230 ($20 on eBay) last week (I apparently already had the required newer BIOS installed - see above). 

It might be of little benefit, but who knows what I'll get up to...

Still no other issues encountered with this config, BTW.

[onrofla]

News!

I called Seagate yesterday with my S/N and got SN04 firmware (they seem to have skipped SN03).

Shut down, pull all drives, flashed each one from a PC with their bootable USB tool and:

seaflashlin -f MakaraPlusEntCapSATA-STD-512E-SN04.LOD -d /dev/sg2

Plug back in and power up. 

No more whining drives.  I'll test for a couple of weeks, and will proceed to the second identical Pro6 setup if no problems encountered.