Slow, but very cheap mass storage solution for regular desktops and external drives
Not suitable for NAS as it uses SMR (Shingled magnetic recording), you're going to have to pony up the extra $60~$80 if you want a WD Red or IronWolf drive.
It depends on your ability to shuck drives. Also warranty is usually voided when you shuck external hard drives.
Not good for nas anyways. Also terrible at read and write speed. Can you explain why you would shuck such drives?
Can you explain why you would shuck such drives?
Good question, why did you recommend those external drive for an internal hard drive deal then?
@Butt Scratcher: Getting confused starring at drives all day. Still can't decide what to get. Really frustrating.
So, why would someone buy SMR drives? Slow, unreliable, poor loading?
The more I read on the internet, the more "beware" I find.
What I understood is that it is a way for the manufacturer to make a profit by selling it to people who are unaware of it.
I am in the market to store a large number of photos. Ideally, I would get a 220j and two 4TB Ironwolf. Due to lack of budget, I am thinking of risking my data with a Seagate 4TB Expansion for $90. Any suggestions?
@Mortin: Firstly mirroring two 4TB drives in the NAS is totally pointless because any malware, ransomware, corruption, deletion, powersurge, fire, theft, etc etc is going to immediately mirror the loss into the second drive.
The Ironwolf is fine, but you don't need two to go into your NAS - you need the second drive to take backups of the first.
Get one internal for the NAS and one USB, then plug the external into the NAS every so often to take a complete backup, then take it to work or somewhere else outside of your home.
3 copies of your data is the usual rule, so either add a third drive into the mix, or sign up for 4TB of cloud space to copy into (Crashplan or similar).
Once you run out of space, shuck the USB and add it to the NAS - you've now got 8TB of space, and now you need to buy an 8TB USB to continue your backups.
Repeat as necessary, and swap out drives when they fail.
@Nom: @Nom Mirroring drives protects against failure of a disk in the NAS. It is not a method to prevent data loss through malware, deletion, powersurge etc. It is not pointless.
@freesteakknives: Use the second drive to take proper offline backups, and not only does it protect against failure of a disk in the NAS, and failure of the NAS itself, it also protects against all the other scenarios too.
This is why mirroring is pointless - it only covers a single data-loss scenario. There are much better uses for that second drive !
@Nom: You are correct. A mirror covers only the scenario of losing a single disk. That is its purpose. That does not make it pointless. Whether that is the best use of the second drive is a different question.
I actually got to RMA a shucked drive, after it broke i entered the serial number on the drive into the seagates RMA checker and was approved for replacement, sent it over, got a working drive mailed back about a month later. so hope is not all lost for the shucked drives
Yeah I've done the same - but this doesn't always work. Sometimes (I suspect most times) the shucked drives have a serial number that doesn't approve a warranty replacement 😐
Would this be good for storing games and movies?
Would the speed of the hard drive affect game performance?
It will take ages to load. When I used to game, I had it installed on an ssd.
These drives are only good of a backup of an entire pc or something similar.
SMR drives don't like overwriting, so no good for backups unless you're only going to fill it once !
This will be good for storing movies, but not games.
You could "archive" games on it that you weren't actively playing, to save having to re-download the whole thing.
But if you were playing a game then you'd want to move it back to your SSD.
Yeah, that would be smart
Being SMR drives, these are good for "write once, read many" types of use cases.
So storing movies definitely, games maybe.
Considering a large proportion of the population with a home nas setup are using it to archive flacs, generic marvel movies and animu tiddies, saying it’s ‘not suitable for nas’ is probably an overreach.
The issue with using SMR drives in a NAS is when it comes to rebuilding the array if a drive ever fails.
In certain situations. When Ars tested them, there was very little difference in a typical consumer rebuild. They had to artificially construct the scenario to replicate the serverathome results.
Still terrible business practices by manufacturers hiding it, but not nearly the binary situation the internet likes to thoughtlessly parrot.
Well said, SMR drives are very OK for probably most of consumer level users.
If you will use your drives with high read/write/rewrite ratios such as NAS with RAID5/6, go for CMR hard drives.
@cptzz: Rewrite is the key - if you're just going to fill the drives and then read them, SMR is absolutely fine.
But if you're going to remove and overwrite data, this is where they fall over - don't buy one if this is what you want to do with it !!
It's not a big deal because there are plenty of none SMR drives on the market (including all Ironwolf and Ironwolf Pro) - so just buy the right drive for your use case 👍
It is a big deal when manufacturers put SMR into a drive without telling anyone, like WD did with some Red models…
It's a shame that Seagate discontinued the Seagate Archive drive series. Oh wait, they didn't, they just started calling them Barracuda instead. You know, the name that Seagate gives to their fast/high-performing drives.
Don't pay attention to the marketing names - this is Seagate's bottom of the range 3.5" drive, it's not particularly fast or high performing… but it still has a place depending on your use case. See discussion above.
Whoosh :)
Hahaha, doh :-) :-)
Touche.
Anyone capture a screenshot of the price?
![[eBay Plus] Seagate BarraCuda 8TB HDD ST8000DM004 3.5inch 5400RPM $202.50 Delivered @ Futu Online eBay](https://files.ozbargain.com.au/n/31/609031.jpg?h=5355cc9e)
Better to buy two 4tb external at under $95 each from ebay Good Guys and many more.