This is the expired previous deal
Original eBay 20% off selected stores deal post
I have been comparing the drive with MSY or CPL and some other stores. I thought this might benefit some people here. I just purchased 2 :)
And of course do not forget the cashback from Cashrewards
No. Using these drives in a NAS can cause other drives to fail when a rebuild is required. Plus, they write data differently compared to ordinary drives, so they perform poorly at writes
They are not suitable for NAS usage at this time.
Agree def not a good drive for NAS. Once their internal buffer fills their through put plummets. Ideal for incremental archive and media (read a lot write a little) use.
Didn't you just define home nas use? Read a lot, write little…
NAS can write a lot too. When they rebuild.
People use NAS's differently, Bob might use it to store Windows backups on a monthly basis, Pete might use it to stream videos to his tablets, Jane might use it to keep her Game of Thrones torrents on and use it as a seedbox.
the number of write operations you do will differ depending on the type of activity your NAS is used for.
but in any case, if you're using your NAS in RAID and you're making frequent writes, then you should get a Seagate NAS drive or a WD RED as opposed to an SMR drive, so you can get better write perf. That's all you need to know.
Its bad for raid 5/6. Try something like snapraid or unraid.. Those are not raid and write parity periodically rather than for every write. Or just mirror them.
you're right, I was thinking in terms of my nas use which is HTPC. i guess others have different experiences.
However i have 2 of these 8tb in my unraid server (which is essentially JBOD + parity) and they are brilliant.
horses for courses. $ / TB and also the importance of maximizing capacity when you are constrained by the number of slots you have is critical for me and i couldn't afford to do it with WD RED or seagate nas HDD's.
I completely disagree. These drives are perfect for NAS, but not for Raid. Don't just equate NAS to mean the same thing as raid.
These drives are great for storing data to be kept and read for a long time.
Except if you want to build raid, having them as standalone drives in your NAS is the best. I have 8 of them.
Also generally, (profanity) raid. Unless you have a business, why bother with raid? Just use normal standalone drives and backup important data remotely/online. The speeds on individual drives for the purposes of NAS is plenty. You don't need raid at all for NAS speeds (unless you have 10Gbps home network with compatibale 10Gbps NIC on all your systems)
Thanks for the explanation. I was getting confused why this would not be suitable for NAS (network attached storage). I think people should be clearer by saying it should not be used as part of a raid configuration.
Yes agree 100%. People commenting that these are not suitable for a NAS address just doing others a disservice. As stand alone drives they are fantastic fit home use at a great price point. I have 4.
The write performance is suspect.
But the main reason you don't want them in a NAS is the warranty.
It's like a car warranty, 3 years or 8760 power on hours. Which is 1 year of 24x7 use.
These drives are designed as backup offline backup drives and that's where they should stay.
See my other comment. The warranty is 3 years or 24x7 use for a year. Unless you're happy with a 1 year warranty they're unsuitable for an always on device.
@andyD101: … but that makes no sense. Nearly every drive I've ever used in a NAS over the last 12 years has only ever had a 3 year warranty and apart from a failure of one of my 2TB Seagates (replaced under warranty) I've never ever had any issues with any other drive going from the 500GB, 1TB, 2TB, 4TB and now 8TB.
Unfortunately you can't really base the performance of any product on its warranty and in fact the opposite could/should be true and in some cases it is ie. lots of very high-end products only come with the statutory 12 month warranty and the reason for that is that the manufacturer knows a failure is extremely unlikely so there's just no point covering it for more than they have to. Warranties make us all feel warm & fuzzy and I'm the first to admit they do play a role in deciding what product to purchase however they're definitely not the be-all-end-all. Best example from personal experience is our proper Swedish built ASKO whitegoods. Stupidly expensive yet they only had a 12 month warranty when new but we thought we'd give them a go. Lucky we did because they've been going strong for 16+ years now without any problems at all (except for a blocked inlet valve which was an easy DIY repair) and they don't look like dying any time soon. If they boasted a 15+ year warranty on them when new I'm not sure it would make much difference to the consumer TBH. Pity ASKO quality plummeted when they moved their manufacturing to China several years ago, at least that's what we've heard anyway.
Why does network speed make the difference between having a raid requirement or not?
@airzone:
It doesn't, @ameel is just suggesting to get the full potential of write speed (aside from rebuilds and other RAID operations), you'd need a) the data already somewhere to move b) 10gE networking c) an internet connection > 1gbit.
| Raid Level | Write Speed |
|---|---|
| raidz1 x3 / raid10 | ~225MB/s |
| raidz2 / raid6 | ~429MB/s |
| raidz1 x5 | ~469MB/s |
Gigabit LAN: ~90MB/s write after overhead.
@andyD101: where did you get the 24x7 1 year (8760 power on hours) warranty details from? I can't access ebay right now to check this particular store's info on warranty, but every other shop indicates a 3 year warranty. Any other conditions for warranty that are not apparent at time of purchase is arguably a breach of Australian Consumer Law
edit: Extracted from: http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/hdd-fam/s…
Reliability/Data Integrity
Workload Rate Limit (TB/year) - 180
Power-On Hours - 8760 (24×7)
Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) (hours) - 800K
Limited Warranty (years) - 3
My understanding is that: 3 year warranty. The data is reliable for 8760 (24x7) power-on hours per year at a workrate limit of 180TB
Also if you had any doubt about my understanding, the hdd's brochure reads "engineered for 24x7 workloads of 180TB"
@Lukian: Correct. There are no advantages for Raid other than (1) redundancy and/or (2) read/write speed. And my point was that read/write speed advantage for Raid is completely lost over a Gigabit network. Remember folks NAS = Network-Attached-Storage, i.e. you access the server/NAS/hdds over the network and then face your Gigabit network bottleneck.
Very important lesson learned first hand, and taught by many: DO NOT EQUATE REDUNDANCY TO BACKUP. Your raid WILL fail sooner or later and you will likely lose EVERYTHING. I have experienced several raid (both raid5 and raid6, and both hardware and software) failures, and more often that not, source of failure caused more than 2 or 3 drives to drop out of the raid, making recovery of raid5 and raid6 unfeasible.
I don't believe in raid anymore for home use. I rather use standalone hard drives (like this one) and backup EVERYTHING online (thanks Crashplan. I bet they weren't counting on users backing up - as of now - 40tb+ when theyoffered unlimited backup). That way even if 1 HDD fail, my other stuff still work, and I can still rely on online backups to restore the data.
Also, Raid requires almost constant read/write, which arguably uses the hdds more than in a non-raid config.
That said, I remember reading something about higher likelihood of degradation of hdds that aren't 'constantly in use' because of 'mechanical fault' for spinning up and down because of infrequent access (don't quote me on that).
@ameel: "DO NOT EQUATE REDUNDANCY TO BACKUP" Yep, couldn't agree more. Don't forget those unexpected power spikes or even catastrophic failure of the host machine to add to the risk of killing your redundancy and data set. Then there's also the hopefully unlikely event of a fire or flood that could also take the NAS and data out in one go. Backup your critical data then depending on how much you value it back it up again and keep a copy offsite!
I can't access youtube, does someone have a brief explanation as to how this drive could cause another drive to fail during a RAID rebuild?
edit: reading here: http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb it sounds like this kind of drive is bad for rebuilding RAID onto, because a rebuild is a huge write operation. But I'm not seeing how it could upset the other drives in the array - maybe because the rebuild takes so long it increases the odds of another failure during the process? A bit of a stretch, but plausible.
@abb: The question is really: "How long can you live without your data being in a usable state?" (while waiting for the raid resilver to finish). And supplement to that: What are the chances of a pet/kid knocking out the power to the NAS device? (in the ridiculous amount of time a rebuild would take with these drives).
A raid rebuild with standard NAS drives takes about 3~4 days (~10 hours per 4TB at 115MB/s) as long as the NAS is otherwise idle. Based on this Seagate Archive review you could expect ~30hrs per 4TB rebuild time with SMR archive drives.
Additionally: It depends how much you value the data on your NAS. Keep additional backups (cloud, external drives) for the important things.
I use my NAS as non RAID backup and torrent client.
I've got 2x4TB disk in there, one is noisy and the other almost full.
Would these disk be good for torrents?
Are they quiet?
I've used 4 in RAID 5 in my Synology NAS for about 1 year now. Can't beat price per GB for these drives. Performance is slower for writes but is the same speed for reads as opposed to my previous 4x2TB Desktop Drives. Probably would die sooner than if I used it without RAID or if I used a NAS drive, or even a desktop drive, but the 24TB is sure nice.
I hope you've got a backup somewhere. The odds of rebuilding successfully if a disk fails with that much data with 1 disk redundancy (RAID5 / SHR1) don't appear to be that great.
(1) don't bother with raid (2) esp. with these hard drives.
what are you doing??? just use them as standalone drives. i got 8 in my homeserver, trust me, the random person from the internet
Just wondering about use cases for this drive? About the best use I can come up with as a movie/tv drive where the contents do not change often.
Interested in hearing your use cases.
Perform a weekly incremental backup with a monthly full backup. Store an extra copy of your photos/home movies. Store all your iso files. Anything that doesn't need fast write access.
Does archive mean it is not fit for any other purposes but archiving, since archiving is the least intensive use?
http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb
It was a drive built specifically for data center conditions. Lower power consumption, data integrity and data retrieval (as opposed to writing data).
So that means, this drive is good for storing relatively unchanging data — hence the name, archive HDD.
It is not recommended for NAS use! SMR drives behave badly in a RAID NAS.
For that you should buy a NAS-optimised drive such as this not an SMR drive.
I completely disagree. These drives are perfect for NAS, but not for Raid. Don't just equate NAS to mean the same thing as raid.
These drives are great for storing data to be kept and read for a long time.
Except if you want to build raid, having them as standalone drives in your NAS is the best. I have 8 of them.
Also generally, (profanity) raid. Unless you have a business, why bother with raid? Just use normal standalone drives and backup important data remotely/online. The speeds on individual drives for the purposes of NAS is plenty. You don't need raid at all for NAS speeds (unless you have 10Gbps home network with compatibale 10Gbps NIC on all your systems)
What is SMR?
it describes the way these drives write data tracks on the magnetic disk. the write head of a normal drive needs to leave space between data tracks.
H = read/write Head
x = empty space
1,2,3 = data track 1,2,3
old method
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111 H
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx H
222222222222222222222222222222222222222222
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
333333333333333333333333333333333333333333
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
…
SMR
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
11111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
22222222222222222222222222222222222222222 H
33333333333333333333333333333333333333333 H
…
upside is much higher densities and therefore capacity.
downside is to write track 4 it deletes track 3 and writes both 3 and 4 so once the drive fills up write speeds get slower as they involve a read operation.
An archive drive is meant for one time write, many times read environment. Such as a backup disk.
It is not meant to be used in a nas or intensive write environment, definitely dont boot from it or play games.
Except this drive is slow to write and ok to read so its not good for backup drive either. Its good for static content that is written once and read many times like say a media drive. If u want some resilience check out snap raid. You probably need like a 9 tb parity disk though.
Games are mostly read only. The read performance on these drives is no problem for gaming.
I have one that I back up my photos to.
Never read off it just write to it everytime I load photos onto the PC.
Might grab another and put in an external case.
I've had one for a few months as a backup drive now and it runs pretty good. Only problem is that it's quite loud when you are writing to or reading from it.
I use mine in a very active NAS had 3 of them since not long after they came out all going well.
Agree though, wouldn't raid them or boot from them.
So should i use these if my NAS doesnt use RAID
I'm considering buying one of these. Either sticking it into an enclosure or my spare Buffalo NAS. And sticking it at the in-laws (who don't use their cable internet very much). And using that as an off site backup of my actual RAID10 (4x3TB) NAS. Or at least a subset of that data.
My concerns are:
Will this be ok in an enclosure or do they run hot?
If it's not going to be used in a RAID array it should suit the above use case?
I have a single drive NAS enclosure which shuts the drive down after inactivity. Should I use this feature with this drive or should I treat it like a 24x7 drive and keep it spinning/on?
Great post leonardoryan.
Thank you mate, hope it's useful. Many experts here discuss about the usage of the drive. My main objective with this drive I just purchased is to store data, it wont be used to boot or perform raid. As it carries the name archive this definitely suit to my needs.
Thanks for your insight - bought 3 for 24Tb, this should last years… Will use in a Drobo for write once, access many times.
What price are the 8TB NAS Drives?
Got a few of these earlier in the year during another Kogan/eBay sale for just under $250 each (https://www.ozbargain.com.au/comment/3565760/redir). Have been using two mirrored in a NAS ever since and they work perfectly.
thanks OP, purchased 2.
I already have two of these running in an Unraid server since the beginning of the year (it runs 24/7). No issues and it serves the purpose of a media backup and storage device with decent enough write speeds. Most of the time they sit there serving up media for the different streamers and devices on my network (which they do very easily).
I have found them to be complete crap completely unreliable, at any random moment they can crash and lose most or all of the data on the drive.
I tried using one to store data on and then I have 2 drives for backup.
I backup(copy) to drive 2 and then shut down the machine, remove drive 2 and bring drive 2 to another location and bring drive 3 back home.
I backup(copy) to drive 3 and then shut down the machine, remove drive 3 and bring drive 3 to another location and bring drive 2 back home.
I keep repeating steps 1 and 2. At any time any one of the drives from the main one to either drive 2 or 3 that I use for backups can crash and randomly lose all or most of the data on the drive.
I bought 6 drives out of 6 drives five have crashed losing data, the only reason drive 6 hasn't crashed is because I haven't used it yet.
Layman terms please everyone. All I simply want to do is download on another drive and when complete transfer over to this to store and stream to the households TV's etc. Will this be ideal? There won't be much deleting going on.
Should be fine. There are many conflicting reports on these drives but I haven't yet had a problem with the three I bought 6 months ago. As per any data storage though, be sure to always keep important data stored in at least two places… three is better and an offsite location is even better still however as you're only using it for storing downloaded content then it's up to you how 'important' that data is.
This is a drive designed for datacenter-specific applications. I wouldn't try to use it outside of a datacenter. "Should be fine" isn't good enough for data storage, you should buy a drive designed for your application - i.e. a standard drive. Really not sure what this oddball part is doing here.
These are not enterprise drives, Seagate use this exact drive in their domestic 8TB External USB product. In my daily experience, Storage Array/Datacentre HDDs run at 10-15k RPM, use an SAS interface and are usually only about 2-4TB with 6TB capacities just starting to creep into newer gear however 8TB Enterprise drives are probably just around the corner. They also cost 3-4 times as much as domestic stuff. These 8TB Seagates are 'Archive' drives which of course means they're designed for less 'writes' than 'reads'. 'Should be fine' applies perfectly here considering the domestic application, the question asked and as long as the owner implements a regular backup process.
What's the warranty procedure on these if they fail?
Seagate send you boxing instructions and you send it to the australian service centre.
8TB hard drive! Is this thing real? Are we in the future now?
I feel like I'm in the future every second
I did get a couple of these, was using one for media, and one it's backup.
But have now decided to go with WD Black Drives, and put both for backup. They are painfully slow, and frankly I just don't trust them to last inside a PC, powered on for even a few hours. Even browsing the HD looking through large media libraries is unbearable. Forget if you will be writing data (particularly small files) often.
They serve a purpose, but I'd still suggest to keep them for backup only.
ill have to get 2 i guess to dump my torrents on
I went an got a WD RED 8TB NAS and its much faster(and more expensive) and that's the way I'll go in the future, I can't afford to keep losing 8TB of data.
even the red wont prevent failures! so unless your backing that data up you will eventually lose it.
id never pay that much, just for dumpting 20gig of downloads a day its fine.
What price did you pay?
Currently $439.20 after 20% CLICKMORE discount
http://www.ebay.com.au/itm/Western-Digital-WD-Red-8TB-3-5-SA…
Will these be good for storing video files and playing them ?
Yes, as long as you aren't replacing/deleting content excessively.
Can anyone tell me please what is the advantage of this archive drive over say the Seagate Backup Plus 8TB Desktop External?
Same drive, just cheaper and not in a box.
(Reply to hetzjagd as above, please delete this)
anyone have any thoughts or comments about shipping methods for these drives under the "Standard Postage (Australia Post Parcel Post Parcel)"
Is this safe enough to post HDDs? I have thoughts of these deliveries getting jumbled up with normal post, and so not being too friendly for items such as hard disks.
Have had many HDDs shipped via Australia Post and never had any problems. HDD heads park themselves when powered down so they can handle a fair bit of shock/impact. If buying 2nd hand you'd want to confirm how the seller plans to pack them and maybe some pics of them packed just to be sure. Pay by PayPal and you should be covered in the worst case anyway.
Futu have sent this package by courier (Fastway) after I selected free Standard Postage…
If anyone is interested, here is how I have been using my 8TB Archive drive for almost a year, quite flawlessly, on a NAS/server. I have included this because maybe you have a similar setup, and might find it useful.
I have a total of five drives on my Windows 2012 R2 low power server (running a 25w Athlon 5350):
1) 240GB Seagate Enterprise SSD for OS
2) 3TB Seagate drive for movies only
3) 3TB Seagate drive for tv shows only
4) 2TB Seagate drive for misc files (but including virtual machine images)
5) 8TB Seagate drive for backups.
Now, generally, I need to back up some items twice a week:
1) Movies downloaded to the 3TB Movie drive
2) TV shows downloaded to the 3TB show drive
3) Back ups of my virtual machine images.
4) User settings/profiles
So each Wednesday and Sunday, I have a backup task that grabs anything new or changed from those locations, and then drops it on the 8TB Archive drive. Generally, this is about 12-20GB bi-weekly. This has been operational for almost a year, and has been quite effective.
Now the most important thing is that none of my hostable services, such as Plex, web server, file share, etc, ever touch 8TB Archive drive. They always access one of their designated disks (e.g Plex only touches TV and Movie drive). So the 8TB Archive is only ever used for updating the backup set, and has no other purpose (spends most of its time powered down).
So is it OK for NAS use? well yeah, but depends on your setup. If you are using ZFS pools, or RAIDs, then definitely not. But, if you are using them as they are designed (scheduled backups, or infrequent writes), then they are excellent. To mirror those drives that I have without this disk would be very difficult. I know its not enterprise OK, but its quite suitable for my purposes at home.
Note:
- Don't know how I ended up with so many Seagate drives, that was unintentional.
- My first 8TB Archive drive died after a few days. Seagate sent me a replacement the next week, and were super helpful (sent me padded bag and postage paid).
How come this deal did so much better than the other?
Thanks - great deal, just snapped one up!
showing out of stock now
Had been watching this all morning, 2 more became available and I managed to grab them :)
I received late last week. Interestingly it arrived in a Shopping Express box. It was well packaged.
good drive to put in the NAS however these days i just cant not stand the noise made by those HDD..even a little bit..