Anything to worry about on those new 8TB drives?

[Marcos]

I'm impressed they are here already. Good value too.

Considering simplifying a few of the 2TB drives I have into a single 8TB.

[DanceswithUnix]

You mean the Seagate one? It is a shingled drive, expect writing to be horribly slow, it isn't intended for normal use more I think for people like Netflix building video cache servers.

I would stick to 4TB or 6TB drives for now, plenty of non SMR drives to choose from there.

[Splash]

poor write performance, as DanceswithUnix says. Plus the usual "don't put all your data on a single disk" routine. Don't use them in RAID5.

[Bluecube]

Why shouldn't you put on RAID5?

[Bonebreaker777]

Why shouldn't you put on RAID5?

Slower writes speeds I guess, especially when data needs to be written and re-written on 3x drives constantly? (If I recall correctly that's how SMR drives work).

[DanceswithUnix]

Why shouldn't you put on RAID5?

AIUI shingled recording works something like this: When you write to the drive, you don't write to a sector or a track, instead the drive has to re-write an entire shingled zone. That takes a long time, hence write performance is poor. That is fine stand alone, but in a RAID array it seems like asking for trouble because if a drive takes too long to respond to a command it is dropped out of the stripe set.

These are for cloud archive, where data is streamed on constantly and then left there. In cloud storage you store the same file on say three drives, it is very wasteful so you need really big drives.

[Marcos]

Interesting, so it's actually currently perfect as a backup drive to my other drives?

[Splash]

Why shouldn't you put on RAID5?

because the array rebuild times on a failure will be phenomenally high (both due to the size of the disk and the slow write speed), and the likelihood of a second failure (and hence you having to restore all of that data from backup) is reasonably likely. I personally won't use R5 for disks above 1Tb for this very reason.

These are designed for cold storage, nothing more.

[DanceswithUnix]

Interesting, so it's actually currently perfect as a backup drive to my other drives?

It *might* be, if you are willing to research how to use them. From a quick google it seems there are three different types of SMR drives available, so I would hope these are"device managed" ones where they behave like a normal drive apart from weird write performance.

Have you looked at the cost of cloud backup?

[Agrippa]

I have owned 5 8TB Seagate Archive drives for seven or eight months now and I'm extremely pleased with them. As far as write speed goes I get ~140MB/s over SATA3, which is fine with me and not what I'd call "horribly slow". For all practical intents and purposes they appear just about as fast as my Constellation ES.3s. Being designed for cold storage the drives spin down very quickly and they are also marginally slower to spin up than my other drives, but that's the only downsides I've been able to glean since I bought them.

As mentioned above they're not suitable for RAID5, which Seagate will also tell you if you ask them.

[DanceswithUnix]

I have owned 5 8TB Seagate Archive drives for seven or eight months now and I'm extremely pleased with them. As far as write speed goes I get ~140MB/s over SATA3, which is fine with me and not what I'd call "horribly slow". For all practical intents and purposes they appear just about as fast as my Constellation ES.3s. Being designed for cold storage the drives spin down very quickly and they are also marginally slower to spin up than my other drives, but that's the only downsides I've been able to glean since I bought them.

As mentioned above they're not suitable for RAID5, which Seagate will also tell you if you ask them.

Yeah horribly slow was a bit strong, from more reading my later "weird write performance" seems fairer. It is only going to chug if you repeatedly try to change something in the middle of the 256MB zones causing the drive to have to read the entire zone in to tweak the contents and write it back out again. For backup purposes any modern OS should I hope cache the writes so that they splurge out in big lumps that the drive can handle well.

Out of interest, are you using the drives with a backup program or just dropping files on to them?

I imagine if you treat them like a tape drive, they would be pretty awesome (compared to tape at least).

[shaithis]

Since Seagate started manufacturing 2TB and above consumer drives, their reliability have been suspect at best.

8TB of data on a Seagate drive? Data roulette. I would either buy 2 and mirror them or raid a few 4TB drives instead.

[Agrippa]

Out of interest, are you using the drives with a backup program or just dropping files on to them?

I'm just dropping files on them, specifically my movies, TV series and such. When I first got them I dropped 3+TB onto each one, which served as a nice "burn-in test", and I fully expected at least one of the five to keel over and die, but all performed flawlessly and have kept on doing so since.

I imagine if you treat them like a tape drive, they would be pretty awesome (compared to tape at least).

I wouldn't really know, having never used a tape drive. Nor ever seen one in the flesh, so to speak.

Since Seagate started manufacturing 2TB and above consumer drives, their reliability have been suspect at best.

There have been greater than usual fault rates in Seagate's cheapest consumer drives, but to equate that with "all Seagate drives larger than 2TB are suspect" is just downright ignorant.

8TB of data on a Seagate drive? Data roulette. I would either buy 2 and mirror them or raid a few 4TB drives instead.

You deal with your data as you see fit and I'll do the same with mine. Personally I've had far less problems since giving up RAID altogether, after using RAID 1, 5 and 6 extensively over a 15+ year period.