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An alright price for an 8TB desktop drive from Amazon.
Seagate Expansion 8TB Desktop External Hard Drive US $183.20 (~AU $246) Delivered @ Amazon
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It's a backup drive. I back up 8tb of archival video content to somwthing similar then back that up to another 8tb for offline storage. 3 points of storage makes it harder to lose due to hardware failure.
Your friends would rejoice ….no more having to watch those holiday videos selfies, etc.
I'm sure we said that when 1GB HDDs were the new thing too. Just buy 2 and back it up, you'll be fine :)
Yeah ,I bought a 4TB Western Digital My Book to back up my important documents etc lasted just over warranty and started making weird noises and then unable to access .Luckily found some software that got me back in and then recovered everything to a Hitachi drive.Since, I'm not very confident in drives ,found out later it was made during the time of the Thia floods where the factories are located and they produced a lot of bad drives around that time .So the thought of trying to recover 8TB of info if it went bad uuuggghh
Cool story.
i enjoyed it
That's the OzBargain spirit
Don't forget Cashrewards!
So it wasn't really a backup then?
I think I read somewhere that WD uses Hitachi for their My Book series anyway.
If it were a backup… that implies you have another copy somewhere.
Which you should always have anyway, regardless of your drive size. You were lucky — most drive failures make recovery basically impossible (without spending >$1000), whether it's 500 GB or 8 TB.
Nice deal Lyl. Better bang for buck compared to the 4TB deals. An archive drive doesn't live inside it does it? I'm pretty sure it doesn't just can't find any solid information to confirm.
The drive I shucked after I bought last week in the 4tb version had same looking enclosure. Was a 5900rpm st4000dm000 inside. I didn't mind. I think a 5900rpm is worth the power saving and possible longer life for my application.
It seems though that this could be the drive for the 8tb version = ST8000DM002
Which is 7200rpm. They don't seem to have any 5900rpm 8tb.Sounds right, the rating was too high on Amazon to be an Archive Drive (they have their purpose but generally aren't a popular drive)
I'm with you, I prefer 5400/5900rpm since they are only used for storage in my case. SSD for performance.
EDIT: Haxxa below says this is the SMR (Archive) drive. Hmmm.
That's the thing about Shucking. You don't know what you'll get and you void your warranty. Have done it 3 times over the years and I stick to mid range drives under $150. I wouldn't like an smr drive but admittedly, I probably wouldn't notice after the inital load.
The main reason I buy HDDs these days are for my 2 NAS boxes where I'd never put an SMR drive. Having said that, 8TB is no slouch and I'd certainly find another purpose for it, most likely as externally connected storage to my smaller NAS which is small enough to be backed up entirely on 8TB :) So it really wouldn't bother me either.
@sillyhead: Unless they've changed the casing, you're doing it wrong.
I've done it with two 5tb, a 4tb and a 3tb and didn't have to break any seals or clips. I saw one demo saying you had to break a silver foil over the PCB but on mine I didn't have to.
Oh and you don't void your warranty under Australian Consumer Law, so long as you didn't contribute to the fault by doing it.
You sure about that last part? Don't know what the law is but IMO when you start disassembling things you're on your own.
@stonkered: Positive.
Our statutory warranty is much more permissive than a manufacturers*. If what you do with it didn't cause or contribute to a fault** it doesn't matter one bit what you did….though the ACCC is a mostly toothless and useless organisation (as intended) so you may have to go to small claims court to force Amazon to honour the warranty.
An example case was for new car warranties as a few years ago a manufacturer or two tried to claim someone doing a service who isn't unauthorised by them would void the warranty. Obviously a big fight, because servicing was where they made their money, but it was tested in court and the ACCC won.
That said I always fill it then do a few tests before shucking them as it's just not worth the hassle.
- You couldn't go directly to Seagate for the statutory warranty as only the retailer has the obligation to provide it…though it wouldn't surprise me if Seagate were fine with it.
** With a HDD obviously something like excessive heat can damage it so if it was a special model designed only for external use then that would count as causing/contributing.
Fair enough, my choice of words, 'disassembling things…' was probably poor as I agree that certain products this should be ok with. Still not convinced on shucking a drive though, you're trying to turn it in to an internal drive to save some money, and yeah there is a good chance the shucking had nothing to do with for example bad sectors but how would a retailer know what else has happened? Seems like you'd be stretching the friendship a little too far. Just IMO.
I bought a few of these from Amazon earlier this year. They report as ST8000AS0002 — so, Archive, and I'm pretty sure they're SMR.
The hard drive inside the enclosure is SMR based, so great for Backups and archives, but for anyone planning on removing the drive and using in a Desktop or NAS keep this in mind.
You mean smr base (I don't even know the meaning) is not good for nas?
Read this for a review of the seagate archive (SMR) drive. http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb
Assuming this drive is inside the product in this thread, it is suitable for backups but not RAID. Rebuilding a RAID array using one of these drives results in terrible performance.
Im using 4 in my Synology NAS in RAID5 because yolo lol. All jokes aside, it is very risky and yes rebuild times are horrible, but after it settled down speeds are quite decent, and its perfect for me because 90% of the time I access files not write to it. Not really concerned about it because I have (multiple) backups and by the time they die, hopefully 10TB drives will become cheaper.
As you say, it's only a problem to rebuild TO an SMR drive.
If you had an array of all SMR drives, except one hot spare "normal" drive, it would rebuild at the expected speed.
(RAID is dead, use a better filesystem, etc etc)
SMR means Shingled Magnetic Recording. If the drive inside this case is such a drive then it is suited for general backups but not RAID/NAS as Pksw said. Rebuilding an array with these takes an eternity and is risky too (power outages? Hope you have a UPS). In sustained writes I think the speed drops down to about 20MB/s after a short while. Could have those numbers wrong but they're slow. Fine for reading however, used correctly they are fine but it'd be good to clarify exactly what drive this deal contains as it'll be an unpleasant surprise for most if it's SMR.
In my experience they're fine for sustained writes. 150 MB/s sequential. Though they supposedly get worse as they fill up, especially when the OS is unaware of SMR characteristics. I've only dumped a couple backups on there so I don't know how they'll perform as they age.
Just ran a quick CDM:
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 x64 (C) 2007-2016 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
- MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 150.577 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 156.497 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.739 MB/s [ 424.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 6.965 MB/s [ 1700.4 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 177.420 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 168.811 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.519 MB/s [ 126.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 7.165 MB/s [ 1749.3 IOPS]Test : 2048 MiB [L: 20.4% (1518.3/7451.9 GiB)] (x1) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2017/06/05 21:26:25
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 14393] (x64)
That blows my numbers out of the water then. I thought I recall reading that they slow down after sustains writes of >100GB or so but maybe not, or maybe that was early drives as I looked into these years ago when brand new. I just recall deciding against them for NAS use but that's not to say I dislike them.
As far as your aging comment, I don't see any reason for them to age any differently/worse than other drives, if anything they may age better. Time will tell.
@Click_It: The aging was more because SMR does fine on a new drive but slows down as it has to rewrite data, much like an SSD without TRIM.
I'm not sure if there's any effects past 100 GB. I've not explicitly tested that far in a single op yet.
If I buy 2 x HDDs and setup as RAID 1; but before that, clone the drive manually (e.g. using Acronis); will it make the RAID 1 clone/rebuild faster?
Oh I misread what you meant, yeah I guess they'd have to slow down a bit nearing full, maybe there's a level of space that should be left on these things instead of cramming them full.
When I eventually buy 1 or 2 (coz I've now decided my next HDD purchase WILL be SMR) I'll let you know. I'll be copying multiple Tb's in one go.
@Click_It: I just saw in Pksw's link that they apparently have a 20 GB cache. I only did a 2 GB test last night, big enough to test past the DRAM cache but not a PMR cache… I'll try a 32 GB one (largest CDM can go) today - it should be done by the time I'm home!
This is the OCAU thread I originally started reading back in 2014. Many there using them in their RAID's (not that I recommend them for that purpose), one guy had 16 of them running in RAID
I've had 16 running in a zpool (2x vdevs of 8 drives in raidz2) for almost a year without hiccup.
I've never had an issue copying data (120MB/s) via SMB and read speeds are great too (~140MB/s per disk, ~~2GB/s for zpool on scrub)
@elusive:
From my experience they have about a 10 gigabyte buffer in them, so if your writing less than 10 gig at a time you get really fast speeds, but once the buffer is full, it will slow down to 15 or so MB/S and takes days to fill the entire thing.I do however find them to be great drives for my purposes (storing massive amounts of TV shows that everyone in the house can access)
@Click_It: 32 GB test is still in the region of 150 MB/s sequential read/write. Again, this is a fairly new drive, no idea how it'll perform as it ages.
CrystalDiskMark 5.1.2 x64 (C) 2007-2016 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
- MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]
KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 165.842 MB/s
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 141.557 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 1.249 MB/s [ 304.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 6.689 MB/s [ 1633.1 IOPS]
Sequential Read (T= 1) : 152.030 MB/s
Sequential Write (T= 1) : 169.149 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.381 MB/s [ 93.0 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 6.125 MB/s [ 1495.4 IOPS]Test : 32768 MiB [L: 20.4% (1518.3/7451.9 GiB)] (x5) [Interval=5 sec]
Date : 2017/06/06 19:30:20
OS : Windows 10 Professional [10.0 Build 14393] (x64)
@Kegsta: I tested again against 32 GB and still got similar sequential speeds. Now I'm wondering how people got ~15 - was it an older (or full-ish) drive?
Even 32gb probably isn't enough to fill the 20 gig cache mentioned in another post(newer ones may have even bigger caches) as the second the first byte hits the cache it begins writing and emptying itself to the actual drive, so it may be able to write 12 gig onto the disk before the cache is full.
Try 100-200 gig if you have time. (I would also but that crystalmark.info is all in another language)
Don't get me wrong I have 3 SMR drives already and think they are great, but if you want to copy 8TB of movies for your mate i guarantee you it won't be writing at 140MB/s
@Kegsta: Unfortunately, CDM only goes up to 32 GB.
That said, even assuming the cache empties into the drive at 50 MB/s (much higher than the claimed 15 MB/s), I should still be seeing some speed reduction, not a consistent 150 MB/s throughout.
I just copied 75 GB of videos onto one. Still ~150 MB/s though the whole process. Actually, leaning towards 160 MB/s average, no dips below ~145 MB/s. https://files.ozbargain.com.au/upload/125578/49600/2017-06-0…
And I only hear disk activity for maybe 10s after it finishes (they're noisy drives!). So it doesn't seem to be clearing a huge cache either.
Unless you're suggesting they have a 100 GB cache?
Keeping in mind that I'm effectively writing to untouched areas of the drive and using a drive that's already been filled once could be worse.
I'd do a bigger test, but the primary copy of my backups are all on a slower (PMR! ST2000DL003) drive, which maxes out around 80-90 MB/s read.
@elusive:
Interesting, very good results, the drives I used are several years old, and were the very first SMR drives maybe they have made a lot of improvements to the drives firmware since the first iterations.My motherboard is a few years old now and may have inferior sata controllers also, but i doubt that should make much difference.
I'll copy a few hundred GB now and see what results I get for that amount also.
Yea, I wouldn't be surprised if they've improved firmware since.
I've got mine connected via USB. But all SATA controllers within the last decade should be fine…
I'm doing a 600gb test on my newest 8tb now, I'm not getting the same speeds as you, started at about 120 MB/s for the first 20 or so GB, then dropped to around 80 MB/s until 200gb, then to 40 MB/s average from then on, which isn't as bad as I remember on the very first 5TB SMR drive ever produced (which has now died on me)
http://imgur.com/Ipg3eOv
The story so far.Mine are all internal archive drives, st8000as0002.
edit: you also mentioned yours are noisy, my archives are very quiet, maybe you got lucky and got an ironwolf inside!
@Kegsta: Weird… where are you copying from? I sustained 80 MB/s (limited by read) through a 590 GB backup copy overnight.
Also, how old is that drive? I mean, have you used it much? Written enough to fill the drive at least once? I wonder if that's it.
@elusive:
Copying from a 4tb non SMR, which read speed is fine afaik. It's a couple of years old, and about 3/4 full, but the copying follows the exact same pattern as when I first got it.
Cheese base ftw
What is this!?
1997 December 3 Maxtor 8,400MB $USD679.99I'm just thinking. Imagine losing 8GB of data when the HDD breaks.
Good option to backup 4x 3TB (7.8 TB of available space) WD Reds in SHR inside Synology 916+?
Regardless of RAID configuration, ideally you want to keep backups separate so there isn't a single point of failure. This drive would be a good backup solution for your NAS but I would recommend keeping it as a separate external hard drive and running periodic backups.
I'm actually getting tempted to pick up some SMR drives when they have another price drop. Purely as a backup for my NAS. Currently my smaller NAS backs up to the larger NAS effectively killing usable space, a few of these would actually be perfect for periodic NAS backups. I'm thinking <$200 will be my trigger point given I'm in no particular rush.
I reckon that's a great idea. Many people rave on about their RAID or ZFS setup, yet never implement an isolated backup. For the price, SMR Drives are fantastic for this purpose and offer peace of mind.
If you're really paranoid implementing CrashPlan, Amazon Cloud Drive etc. adds a third point of protection. But at the added costs of a subscription fee and Bandwidth, I much prefer local Backups.
100% agree with you. My mind is made up, that's the next drive I will buy when space needs expanding.
And as for cloud, that's something I'd like to implement for about 2TB of my backups (my personal/critical data). In an ideal world I'd back everything but the cost would be horrendous I think. This also depends on what I can get out of the NBN, I am expecting a maximum of ~60/35 (FTTN) but we'll see.
cough cough storage place for illegal movies
No, Linux distros ;)
These desktop hdds are looking more and more like a shed each day. I guess they're both used to store shit we rarely use…
Good deal thanks OP just placed an order. Haven't used an SMR drive before so willing to take the gamble and see how it performs.
Just picked up two of these to use purely for backups. Will see how they go
So does it have one normal interface harddisk inside?
Just got mine today. It is indeed a Seagate Archive Drive model ST8000AS0002.
Just got mine today…to bad it does not come with AUS plug :(
I opened mine and inside Seagate Barracuda Compute ST8000DM004; quick staticice search, this would cost $400+?
I'm just thinking. Imagine losing 8TB of data when the HDD breaks.