My 4 TB backup HDD was getting filled up, as was a 1 TB drive I use for storage. So I decided to solve both problems at once by getting an 8 TB drive for backups and use the freed up 4 TB drive for storage.
So far I've copied about 1.2 TB of data from the ST4000DM00 (4 TB, 5900 RPM) to the ST8000AS0002 8 TB drive. Speed is between 110 and 170 MB/s which is not bad at all for transfers between two 5900 RPM drives. I think the limitations of SMR only kick in when you've written once to all the tracks so the drive has to re-write adjacent tracks rather than simply writing to pristine tracks. Will see how much performance degrades when it has been used for a while and whether it has any built-in housekeeping to keep non-adjacent tracks ready.
Performance was almost a non-issue since it's just a backup drive. I did turn off backup merging in EaseUS Backup though, because that's a very read/write intensive operation. With so much space available I can just keep an extra full backup instead of consolidating.
So far I've copied about 1.2 TB of data from the ST4000DM00 (4 TB, 5900 RPM) to the ST8000AS0002 8 TB drive. Speed is between 110 and 170 MB/s which is not bad at all for transfers between two 5900 RPM drives. I think the limitations of SMR only kick in when you've written once to all the tracks so the drive has to re-write adjacent tracks rather than simply writing to pristine tracks. Will see how much performance degrades when it has been used for a while and whether it has any built-in housekeeping to keep non-adjacent tracks ready.
Performance was almost a non-issue since it's just a backup drive. I did turn off backup merging in EaseUS Backup though, because that's a very read/write intensive operation. With so much space available I can just keep an extra full backup instead of consolidating.
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