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Experiences with Seagate 8TB Archive SMR?


Nerva

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Has anyone tried using Seagate 8TB Archive drives in their Drivepool setup?

 

I have a home server with about 20TB of storage -- 90% of it is used for video (mostly my blu-ray collection) and the remainder is used for music and backups of computers in the house -- currently only a small amount of important stuff is redundant.   I also use a couple old 1TB drives just for PVR that are in a separate pool.   I'd like to add some larger drives (probably 8TB) so that I can make the entire thing fully redundant.

 

I've been reading this review of the Seagate 8TB Archive drive that uses SMR:

 

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb

 

The upshot is that read performance is excellent (probably 10x or 100x my bandwidth needs for watching movies), but due to the SMR technology the write performance drops from excellent to horrible if sustained writes are larger than 20GB.   Basically it has 20GB of space it can write to quickly, and then it slowly moves that to the SMR portion of the drive -- so if you saturate the cache, it slows to a crawl.   The article explains that this is horrible for a RAID array when it comes time to rebuild parity, but it is considered acceptable for non-RAID applications.

 

So, I'm thinking that this drive should work acceptably with Drivepool, since the write operations are just to fill the drive in the first place and then to add new blu-ray files from time to time.   The good thing about the drive is it has very low power consumption and price per TB, so it would seem to be a good choice for my home server application.

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I myself have 4 of the 8tb seagate drives - I too had a lot of concern about the type of drive and how it works,  with the  SMR format (lack of better word). From what I have found all over the net is - As long it is mainly used to access the files, all  should be ok. you will have slow write speed. seems to me, the read speed is ok.   BUT I was warned not to use it like a desktop drive. i.e. read and write all the time . that's all the advice I could find.

 

So far I haven't had any problems and i've had the drive for 11 months (Not long).

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I myself have 4 of the 8tb seagate drives - I too had a lot of concern about the type of drive and how it works,  with the  SMR format (lack of better word). From what I have found all over the net is - As long it is mainly used to access the files, all  should be ok. you will have slow write speed. seems to me, the read speed is ok.   BUT I was warned not to use it like a desktop drive. i.e. read and write all the time . that's all the advice I could find.

 

So far I haven't had any problems and i've had the drive for 11 months (Not long).

 

 

Yeah, it's a "WORM" type drive (Write Once, Read Many). 

 

As for reads, I have actually seen 190MB/s read from it.  I do use 64kb cluster size ("unit allocation size" when formatting the drive), as this helps with getting better speeds.   

 

 

 

That said, having 14 of these drives, and many of them for more than a year, and I finally had one fail.  Seagate seems to only have recertified drives, though. Which is disappointing. 

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