Seagate 8TB archival HDD in nas?

[BullyCanadian]

I was thinking of using 4 of these in a NAS... I've heard conflicting answers but would it be a bad idea since these are made for archiving rather than being made for a NAS?

 

[dave_the_nerd]

NASes are for archiving though.

It should be fine - the archival drives tend to be slower, and their write-lifespan isn't as big as it could be, but with a 4 drive nas in a typical home environment with wifi and/or gigabit ethernet, you won't notice any speed problems, and if you're just doing nightly or weekly backups of your PCs and storing a movie/music/media library, they should be just fine.

Just don't forget to back up your NAS.

 

[Elixer]

Latency is huge for this drive as well..

I don't think it is well suited for home use.

http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb

Even though Seagate doesn't recommend these drives in RAID groups, we ran a NAS synthetic workload analysis using a Synology DiskStation DS1815+ and checked the performance of both iSCSI and CIFS configurations for the Seagate Archive HDD 8TB in RAID10 mode. With the low cost of the Archive drives, we're seeing gadget blogs and others recommending them for NAS environments. The results for the NAS synthetic analysis is very similar to the sustained synthetic benchmarks in overall placing of the Archive HDD, the read performance was on par with the other drives while the write performance was often lagging. In these tests, CIFS configurations did result in better results for write numbers. The Archive posted 4K throughput read results of 514 IOPS (CIFS), 2,067 IOPS (iSCSI), and average read latencies of 497.07ms (CIFS) and 123.84ms (iSCSI). Again the Archive HDD was at the bottom of the pack in the 8K 70% Read 30% Write tests. Our 8K 100% Read/Write test the drive had a read throughput of 47,255 IOPS (CIFS) and 25,340 IOPS (iSCSI), over twice as high as the runner up. And finally in our 128K large block sequential test showed read speeds of 463MB/s (CIFS) and 193MB/s (iSCSI). More concerning though about using the drives in RAID is rebuild time. In a simple RAID1 group of two drives, the Archive took over 57 hours to rebuild while the NAS was idle. An 8TB PMR drive took a bit under 20 hours.

Ultimately the Seagate Archive 8TB HDD has a lot of legs in very specific use cases. As a single drive it's fine, if the use case can tolerate slower sustained writes. With burst writes and reads, the drive performs very well. In pooled storage, the drive really belongs in a more sophisticated object store. Traditional software or hardware RAID is simply not recommended due to the sustained write penalty that occurs during rebuild. Admins can also get creative, like our Veeam backup test. Using 8 drives we managed to get 64TB raw backup target, with RAID1-style parity. It would be easy to get even more sophisticated for additional data protection. In such cases where cost/TB is a big driver in the decision process, the Archive drive comes in very handy.

 

[finbarqs]

I have 4 of them in a netgear readynas in RAID 10. It's giving me 14+TB and I dump all my movies on there.

 

[sdifox]

As long as you are write once ready many you sould be ok. I am eyeing the Hitachi He drives. :drool:

 

[WT]

Hope to add one to my HTPC soon, replacing its two 4TB Seagate NAS drives that I can then move to my WHS. 8TB backed up by 20TB on the WHS = I'm good to go.

 

[thesmokingman]

I was thinking of using 4 of these in a NAS... I've heard conflicting answers but would it be a bad idea since these are made for archiving rather than being made for a NAS?

Depends on how you use your NAS. If you write often or use it as a workspace these drives are terrible at writing. Reads however are great. I almost bought a couple a few weeks ago, but the jury is still out on their longevity so I didn't jump on it.

Instead, I just re-encoded my collection using HEVC cutting space usage 50% or more in videos, movies, worst offender files. It's surprisingly satisfying shrinking a 25GB movie to 10GB while maintaining the lossless codec and no obvious change in picture quality. It's an ongoing process and I set my server to do it thru the night. It might be something to think about.