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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 on the way.)
I did try one in the RN104 but it errored out on any file over 32GB's, so you might have issues with ARM processor units working with the 8TB devices.
Anyway what I can tell you is that for solid large files these drives are great.. they can easily saturate your network both ways. For small files both read and write performance is pretty abysmal. I picked up all my drives for sub $210 so I'm not going to complain about the speed. Reliability is still an unknown. I do have one drive that I got used that has 3000+ hours on it and it's working just fine.
These drives take forever to reshape and rebuild when adding a new drive but again, all of this can be expected as these drives were never intended to work in a raid environement. I'm just simply saying if you need large amounts of storage in a small space, these drives are definitely a good bang for the buck, just don't expect mindblowing speed out of them.
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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.
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.
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