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Hi All,
Is 8TB the current sweet spot for mechanical drives? It looks like you can get these for £179:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01IAD5ZC6/
I've not managed to find bare drives at that price. I'm after probably 5 or 6 so to upgrade my NAS, so cost efficiency over performace.
Can anyone recommend anything else?
It does look cheap/good value for money (depending on your PoV.
Are you plannng to use it/them as is, or remove them from the housing and use them as barebone drives?
Im slightly sceptical because they are way below a barebones drive. That could be for a number of reasons:
Economies of scale (doesn't really stack up as they are BB drives to stat with)
Loss leaders (Again doesn't stack up)
Second grade drives that either have lower interface speeds (but fine for USB speeds) or have a higher than normal bad sector count at mfr which, while mapped out and replaced from the pool of spare sectors, have an arrangement might limit absolute performance.
There may be other possible reasons.
None of the ones I have mentioned would necessarily rule them out for portable or archive storage (if you use hard drives for archive storage) but might have performance issues for online storage.
I would emphasise that is only theorising, but if something sees to good to be true... not that that might preclude it from use if if it suits ou.
But compare it with this https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00SJBHP..._t3_B01IAD5ZC6 which has a much higher read speed. There are other 8TB drives that have even faster read speeds - at higher price.
This would seem to be the barebone drive the packaged one is based on http://www.ebuyer.com/705293-seagate...YsEaAj6W8P8HAQ
Apparently someone opened theirs and these are the drives in there :-
https://www.scan.co.uk/products/8tb-...28mb-cache-ncq
Yes, same as the one I linked to from eBuyer.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jonj1611
Hmm how odd, half your message was missing when I wrote my reply, its there now. Oh well :)
Hmm.. the amazon price seems like a bit of an anomaly. They quite a bit more elsewhere. I see what you mean about the read speed @peterb, but that other drive you linked is double the price.
I'm thinking 5 or 6 of these in RAID-5 or RAID-6 is likely to max out the GigE connection to my NAS before I hit the physical disk speed issues anyway?
They were £120 on Prime Day. I still didn't buy one.
I did :)
Still in the box and will be used as backup when I can be arsed to start transferring 8t of data. Can report back on any interesting findings if you like?
What happens to the warranty if you crack open an external drive? Would they still honor the standard warranty for the drive or is it all-or-nothing? There is quite a price difference and weirdly, from what I see the external drives get a 2 year warranty as opposed to the internal counterparts 3 years. Perhaps they expect another component to fail, or that a portable drive will see more abuse, or peterb is at least somewhat right.
I've not been a big fan of Seagate's SMR drives, because of the inconsistent performance during the latter part of the drives operation when writes drop in speed. Of course, this doesn't matter if your NAS workload is light or primarily read. With competition so tight between the titans in storage manufacturing, you get what you pay for.
I think the warranty is void if you open the case yourself. And I think the drive serial numbers indicate they are part of an external drive
I might have been editing it.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jonj1611
Yes, and then you need to ask why there is such a difference. Is one being sold at a premium because it's faster, or is the other being sold off cheaply because of the performance?Quote:
Originally Posted by b0redom
Quote:
Originally Posted by b0redom
Hard to say, but if you are running in an array, consider the time taken to rebuild the array in the event of failure - during which time your array is vulnerable to another drive failure.
Sea gate market the drive for archive purposes (the assumption being that they are not in use 24x7). Is that because they aren't capable of 24x7 operation?
I font know the answer, and it depends how critical your data is, and what your backup strategy is.
However, I use HGST or WD reds for NAS type applications. I did use some Seagate in one server, they failed after a couple of years.
Warranty is a possible indication of the mfrs confidence in the drive, based on a statistical analysis on accelerated wear data, but statistics apply to populations, and real world use and conditions vary considerably. And I'd argue that in many cases, warranties are useless. If you have sensitive data on a disk that you can't access (but is still there) are you going to send it back to the mfr?
I expect the low price is down to the occasional use of an external backup drive so they probably expect fewer failures that are covered by warranty vs people drop them.
Advice is to avoid these like the plague for RAID environments: http://www.storagereview.com/seagate...hdd_review_8tb
You could use them for a private cloud deployment, but then you lose the efficiency of a classic raid 6 array so you would be better off with 6TB (or possibly even 4TB) NAS drives.
I got one of these last week in the prime sale for £120. after running some checks to satisfy myself the drive wasn't DOA I filled it up with data, run a couple more checks and cracked it open to find a Seagate barracuda, and not the archived SMR drive. so after dancing around the table in delight I stuck it in my desktop, ran a few checks and it's working perfectly. the next best bang for the buck I got was a 8tb WD external for either £160 or £180 in a deal, and I choose that because it wasn't SMR
I was surprised as I expected it to be SMR and did notice the write speeds were quick, but thought that was because I wasn't rewriting over previous data. a bit of googling found an American site showing some people got archive drives and some got barracudas but there was no way of telling until you got it
I do wonder how they can sell external drives much cheaper than internal. apart from the warranty being different, the external have more components and packaging, so cost more to make. they could potentially offer the internal drives with a shorter warranty and cheaper price. it's been a while since I bought a new internal drive as external has been much cheaper for a while
Congratulations Unique - so bargains can be found (albeit accidentally!)
8TB on a Seagate drive......I hope that data is disposable ;)