Seagate 8TB Review (SMR)

[Riceninja]

kinda disappointing how much of a performance hit SMR takes. guess it truly is for "write-and-done". regardless i'll see how the reliability shapes up over the next 6 months before i get 2 of these in jbod (16TB!) to consolidate all my media drives.

 

[greenhawk]

i'll see how the reliability shapes up over the next 6 months before i get 2 of these in jbod (16TB!) to consolidate all my media drives.

+1

though would be looking at 4 of them myself.

Though if WD brings out a 8TB green, I would go that way instead.

Personally, the seagates need a 25% price drop as currently I can get 2x 4TB WD greens for the same price as a single 8TB Archive drive. I have the case space (and SAS) so high volume in a single drive is not attractive without a price advantage. Just have to see what the price does once the early adpotor price is removed.

 

[Riceninja]

+1

though would be looking at 4 of them myself.

Though if WD brings out a 8TB green, I would go that way instead.

Personally, the seagates need a 25% price drop as currently I can get 2x 4TB WD greens for the same price as a single 8TB Archive drive. I have the case space (and SAS) so high volume in a single drive is not attractive without a price advantage. Just have to see what the price does once the early adpotor price is removed.

case space is usually not an issue but sata ports are. i have 8 sata and only one left (see sig) so it'll be nice to free some up and store the smaller drives in the basement as backup.

and yes id definitely pay a premium for 8tb WD green.

 

[heymrdj]

Well for backups speed does not really matter. The initial backup may take long but after that you're just copying changes anyway. I typically just let my backups run over night.

Depends on how large scale it is. For us, backup speeds are always a problem, but our full backups on the weekends run cover 47 servers and 10TB of data. Backing it up in a span of a weekend has become a major challenge.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Depends on how large scale it is. For us, backup speeds are always a problem, but our full backups on the weekends run cover 47 servers and 10TB of data. Backing it up in a span of a weekend has become a major challenge.

Yeah true if the backups are slower than the rate at which data is changing then that could be an issue for sure. Or even if it's faster, but not much faster, then you practically have to run backups all the time just to keep up.

 

[imported_ats]

Depends on how large scale it is. For us, backup speeds are always a problem, but our full backups on the weekends run cover 47 servers and 10TB of data. Backing it up in a span of a weekend has become a major challenge.

If you are doing just backups then you really want a host aware or host managed SMR. The basic hardware will write at full speed just like any other disk. The issue is that it abhors re-writes.

 

[tweakboy]

Thats a nice porndisk .... gl

 

[stuff_me_good]

Couldn't find any test about how noisy are these drives?

 

[thecoolnessrune]

If you are doing just backups then you really want a host aware or host managed SMR. The basic hardware will write at full speed just like any other disk. The issue is that it abhors re-writes.

I'm pretty sure such a thing doesn't really exist so far. I don't believe the T10 or T13 committies have even ratified a standard yet for HM-SMR. It will likely be quite some time before that happens!

Depends on how large scale it is. For us, backup speeds are always a problem, but our full backups on the weekends run cover 47 servers and 10TB of data. Backing it up in a span of a weekend has become a major challenge.

Are you guys using a professional solution with Incremental backups and some form of CBT? Or does your policy really require full backups every 7 days? I know businesses that do require it, but its usually bi-weekly, and they're doing incrementals daily, not just the bi-weekly fulls.

 

[AdamK47]

It would be nice if Seagate went ahead and used performance specs in their product description for this drive. Just be honest about it instead of purposely hiding it. Seems like a sleazy thing to do. People will buy it for what it is. Places like Newegg and Amazon use it in their descriptions. It's absent without it.

 

[heymrdj]

I'm pretty sure such a thing doesn't really exist so far. I don't believe the T10 or T13 committies have even ratified a standard yet for HM-SMR. It will likely be quite some time before that happens!



Are you guys using a professional solution with Incremental backups and some form of CBT? Or does your policy really require full backups every 7 days? I know businesses that do require it, but its usually bi-weekly, and they're doing incrementals daily, not just the bi-weekly fulls.

The data was considered irreplaceable (directly business related). The downfall of chains is that there can still be verification flukes. 2 per day incrementals on a subset of the constantly changing data, weekly fulls, 3 month weekly retentions, 1 month inc retentions.

Over the top

 

[sdifox]

The data was considered irreplaceable (directly business related). The downfall of chains is that there can still be verification flukes. 2 per day incrementals on a subset of the constantly changing data, weekly fulls, 3 month weekly retentions, 1 month inc retentions.

Over the top

Tehn shadowcopy is the answer. Have a second partition setup on the san and just have it shadow copy the prod partition.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Many SAN providers provide some sort of backup package that can be purchased to work with the SAN. Getting a backup product that integrates with your SAN's backend is super important for fast backups. For instance, if you have a NetApp setup, you can SnapMirror your datastore to a secondary NetApp datastore, and a product like VEEAM can connect through that second datastore to do its backups through your existing Hyper-V or VMWare setup. The result is that your production environment is not impacted at all once the full data has moved to the second backup repository. Doing full backups goes from making a huge impact in your environment, to none, because a separate set of disks is doing all the heavy lifting.

HP has a similar offering with 3PAR and StoreOnce, while EMC of course has their own ecosystem with the Storage system of your choice (VNX, VNXe, VMAX, etc) with Data Domain and Avamar.

Fact is nowadays, if you have a Storage Provider, chances are you have an entire vertical market channel they want you to work through to get the most out of your backups. If you have a SAN, be it HP 3PAR, NetApp, Dell Compellent, NetApp, or EMC, you should look at the products they offer to allow you to utilize non-impacting backups.

It will also be these large, 1st party solutions that will be showing the first signs of support in the enterprise for the large SMR drives this thread is about, as they are working closely to get integrated support (sometimes proprietary, sometimes not) for host-managed SMR.