Seagate 8TB archive drives

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richms

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#190648 7-Jan-2016 16:56

Anyone running a pair of these shingled drives in raid 1 just as somewhere to dump all the movies and TV shows etc onto and playback of them?

I have read that they are not recommended for use in a raid, but I would have thought that being striped would be no different to the writes it would get to it normally, untill resync time came along.

Too much of my stuff is just sitting on a single external drive at the moment. Not important stuff but would be annoying to lose it and have to re-download it.

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KJClayton

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#1465309 7-Jan-2016 18:22

I admin a friend's PC that has 6 of these drives. We decided against 3x RAID1 and instead just rsync from one to another. We had to run an older Linux kernel 3.16 because newer kernels seemed to have issues with the drives, if you wrote too much to them they got "overwhelmed" and started producing errors, eventually giving up and just falling off the controller until a reboot was performed.

The drives are ST8000AS0002-1NA17Z

And they scare me :-/

Not sure what their performance is like under Windows.

richms

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#1465318 7-Jan-2016 18:43

That is concerning if it comes to a resync.

Im not sure if windows raid reads both drives and is happy if they are the same, or its just writing one to the other like my old external box did when configured as a mirror. Seems stupid if its the latter but in the past read and write speeds on drives were not too dissimilar and there wasnt concerns of SSD's with wasting all their writes needlessly etc.

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hio77

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#1465324 7-Jan-2016 18:57

i was originally going to drop a few of these into my unraid machine (Software based raid).

their cache has been seen to cause a few issues with checks on it though (less of an issue in the 8TBs than the 5TB SMR archive disks but still concerns me). After noting the price on toshibas 5TB PMR disks, i just ordered a few of them...

Suspect the issues @KJClayton pointed out are the same as the ones the cache appears to cause in unraids testing.

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richms

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#1465326 7-Jan-2016 19:03

Im limited by ports and bays, so the 5TB toshiba isnt really any better than just shucking a couple of the extrenals and sticking them in.

Richard rich.ms

JimmyH

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#1465327 7-Jan-2016 19:04

I'm just sticking with the 6TB WD Reds at the moment. They seem reliable in a RAID array and the $/TB point seems competitive with other options for bulk storage.

hio77

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#1465329 7-Jan-2016 19:05

sounds like time to look at a DAS to go along side your existing setup! far better than a few externals!

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surfisup1000

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#1465435 7-Jan-2016 21:34

I've got a couple of these -- performance for storing large files media files is just fine for me (win7/win10). I use one for files, the other for backup -- this is my policy,always buy 2 drives otherwise you may lose data. This has saved my bacon a few times over the years.

No errors / dropouts....reading and write speeds seems up to par with other drive types I own. They just work like any other drive , was a bit worried about the archive tag at first but all good.

Not using in raid though.