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.
Re: Seagate 8TB Archive drives (ST8000AS0002) do work
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.
Re: Seagate 8TB Archive drives (ST8000AS0002) do work
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.
Re: Seagate 8TB Archive drives (ST8000AS0002) do work
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.)
Re: Seagate 8TB Archive drives (ST8000AS0002) do work
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.
Re: Seagate 8TB Archive drives (ST8000AS0002) do work
Having the same problem now, after backing up about 8TB of 9TB to a JBOD array of 2x8TB discs they aren't tolerating any writing - one or the other drops out and shows as failed, but a reboot fixes.
One has 39 command retrys, the other 6. Otherwise SMART status is fine - will take out and run through SeaTools in next few days.
ifixidevices - how did you revert back to 6.2.4 - USB recovery and factory reset??
Re: Seagate 8TB Archive drives (ST8000AS0002) do work
You have to factory reset once back down to 6.2.4 (after you've installed it.)
So backup your data then once downgraded go from there.
This could be a think with the ultra models versus the pro or other models... I have no idea. I have to hook my drives up to the rn104 and see if I'm seeing the same issues (at this point they already have a ton of errors showing on the smart data so I don't feel comfortable using them... that's why I kind of feel like the firmware ruined them.. prior to that no problems.
Re: Seagate 8TB Archive drives (ST8000AS0002) do work
I know what you mean!!
So far on mine the only SMART 'errors' are command timeouts (39 and 6 respectively) - and whilst being no expert I wonder if this is artifactual from it being hit with too many commands whilst the 'SMR stuff' internally catches up.
I have an RN102 coming soon so may try them in that to see if ARM v. x86 makes a difference.
Thanks for the advice. Will reset on 6.2.4. These drives are the backup of my other NASes - the idea was to eventually have 4x8TB glad I stopped at 2 until this is sorted as they aren't cheap!
Can't you RMA them if they have loads of SMART errors?? Do they pass SeaTools still??
Re: Seagate 8TB Archive drives (ST8000AS0002) do work
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.
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.
Re: Seagate 8TB Archive drives (ST8000AS0002) do work
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.
Re: Seagate 8TB Archive drives (ST8000AS0002) do work
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.
You have no real world experience Stephen unless you have SMR hard drives. You're just spouting what you've heard and read about.
Let's be careful to stop short of personal attacks. The tone of your recent posts are nearing that line. I have no issue with your use of these drives, and I think is it useful for you to share your experiences here. I'd prefer more measurements/hard data than I've seen so far. But I also think its important not to encourage the community as a whole to blindly buy these drives and put them into their NAS. If someone thinks through the implications, and buys them with their eyes open, then that's fine.
It is true that I do not own an SMR drive - because I researched its characteristics, and studied reviews of its performance. Then I decided that it wasn't the right drive for my NAS right now (given the way I use them). I see nothing wrong with that approach. I read up on most things before I buy them.
And referring people to reviewers who have measured the performance of these drives and published their results seems very sensible to me. This one for instance: http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb. The "Raid Usage" section is quite informative and grounded in measured data.
They apparently made some changes to try to deal with SMR drives better. It might be hard to tell if the issue is inherent to the new kernel, or if they made a mistake in their changes. The OS is running on these drives, and log writes (like all other writes, including swapping and ReadyNAS database updates) will ripple. Even if the boot drive is traditional, the OS is still mirrored across the SMR drives.
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.
The drive does have a very large cache, and the firmware is designed to use it to mitigate the impact of the rewriting as best it can. Based on the review measurements, the consequence of using these drives is that when rewriting is needed the sustained transfer speed varies widely from ~10 MB/s to ~150 MB/s. It can stick at ~10 MB/s for quite a while.
Despite allegations that I simply "bash" these drives, they do have their appeal. They are the only affordable 8 TB option I know of (and at ~$32/TB, they are 20% cheaper than WDC Reds per TB). They could be suitable for future use in my backup NAS (which I have switched to run jbod).
However, I do want to keep snapshots on in the backup shares, and I am concerned about the potential impact on rebalancing time (after snapshot deletion), and other volume management functions - defragmentation time, and scrub times. At ~10 MB/sec speeds, they could take a week or more. The impact of apps (particularly plex, with its database) on the transfer speed is also a concern. I am running plex on a backup NAS today.
If you have data on volume maitenance functions (particularly after deleting a few hundred GB of snapshots) that would be interesting.
Re: Seagate 8TB Archive drives (ST8000AS0002) do work
I'm just going to be done posting on the forums. In almost every post I read pertaining to the archive drives you have a negative tone towards using them and that the world will come crashing down if you put them in raid. I'm sorry to tell you it hasn't and it won't.
Anyway there's no point in bothering to express views or help others when there's a heavy bias towards the netgear agenda. Don't buy off of the non HCL list, or better yet just buy a readynas that's populated with drives and spend like 3x as much as if you bought them yourself.
Then there's the matter of how hard you guys rally against downgrading when people were having serious issues. People upgraded production units because new non-beta firmware comes out that causes severe headaches and there's a solution (albeit a lot of work) and you suggest no just wait, put up with the lockups or not being able to use your device as it was intended and the features that were working fine before please stop using them until we can fix it (btw we have no idea how long it will take.) And now we've got a beta that should fix it all, or at least we hope so! Definitely put a beta version on over downgrading!
It's fine, I can't take the constant arguing anyway. Look at any post of mine or any post anyone metions about the 8TB drives and look at how fast you show up in that thread saying they're a bad idea. That's fine. I told people my experience as well but after every statement I make about the performance I experience with the drives and that they are not as bad as you're making them out to be, you come back saying but look others are having issues and I've read up about the technology so I know they just aren't going to be good! I think people are buying these with the expectation that they are going to be like any other hard drive and they are not. But for what I've been using them for (time machine backups on clients macs, my personal macs) having IPSW's for iphones and iPads stored and ready to go, storing ISO's and installers of OS X and Windows), parallels VM's, my wife's photography business backups, itunes collection backups, customer file backups and everything else I do with them I've had absolutely no problems. Slower yes, but unbearably slow... no. For the price point they are unbeatable. I've got over 35TB's of space with redundancy for under $1200.
Anyway that's enough. All I was trying to do was say it's ok to try them and see if they stand up to someone's performance level. Worst case scenario you can always resell them on eBay for pretty much what you paid for them.
