Seagate 8TB HDD with SMR technology

[tugatosmk]

I found out about Seagate latest massive 8TB HDD with a great price/gigabyte relation (http://www.tomsitpro.com/articles/se...iew,2-822.html) but the article referred the SMR technology (Shingled Magnetic Recording) which was the only way of Seagate to increase the capacity without adding more disc platters.

Is this technology prone to more serious data loss in case of a power surge than the regular HDD? Is Seagate a brand to avoid in terms on reliability or should I give it a try?

If I ever got this HDD it'd would be to use as a multimedia archive and to read from it occasionally. What do you think?

[Renegade334]

Seagate used, once upon a time, to be an excellent brand, but it kind of went downhill once they rolled out a certain Barracuda generation (the 7200.11 if I'm not mistaken, but I could be wrong; I do however remember Seagate advising its clients to check the serial numbers in order to find out whether their drives were part of a "bad" batch or faulty model) and encountered firmwares issues (now patched, I believe), higher attrition rates, etc. In other words, they aren't as good as they once were. The mileage may vary depending on who you ask, but Seagate appears to have a high failure rate among server companies, sometimes more than any other brand. I myself had a Barracuda 1TB for five years or so and I had to replace it due to an increase in failing sectors - sign of rapid degradation and a serious incentive to swap the drive with a new one.

Aside from that, I'm usually gunning for Western Digital models, although I once heard good things about Hitachi DeskStar HDDs in terms of resilience...but IIRC they were also quite pricier. Things might've changed in the meantime so I suggest you also search for reviews to make sure I'm not slipping you obsolete information. OTOH, Seagate is usually cheaper than WD, but is often considered less reliable.

As to whether the 8TB is more vulnerable to power surges, unfortunately I wouldn't know. You'd literally have to buy it and find out for yourself.
If you only occasionally use the HDD as a media library, then yeah, snatching it would be okay, I guess. Infrequent use would keep the amount of wear down, since most HDDs are programmed to stop spinning after a certain amount of time spent in inactivity.

[tugatosmk]

Originally Posted by Renegade334

Seagate used, once upon a time, to be an excellent brand, but it kind of went downhill once they rolled out a certain Barracuda generation (the 7200.11 if I'm not mistaken, but I could be wrong; I do however remember Seagate advising its clients to check the serial numbers in order to find out whether their drives were part of a "bad" batch or faulty model) and encountered firmwares issues (now patched, I believe), higher attrition rates, etc. In other words, they aren't as good as they once were. The mileage may vary depending on who you ask, but Seagate appears to have a high failure rate among server companies, sometimes more than any other brand. I myself had a Barracuda 1TB for five years or so and I had to replace it due to an increase in failing sectors - sign of rapid degradation and a serious incentive to swap the drive with a new one.

Aside from that, I'm usually gunning for Western Digital models, although I once heard good things about Hitachi DeskStar HDDs in terms of resilience...but IIRC they were also quite pricier. Things might've changed in the meantime so I suggest you also search for reviews to make sure I'm not slipping you obsolete information. OTOH, Seagate is usually cheaper than WD, but is often considered less reliable.

As to whether the 8TB is more vulnerable to power surges, unfortunately I wouldn't know. You'd literally have to buy it and find out for yourself.
If you only occasionally use the HDD as a media library, then yeah, snatching it would be okay, I guess. Infrequent use would keep the amount of wear down, since most HDDs are programmed to stop spinning after a certain amount of time spent in inactivity.

I did read about the Seagate lack of reliability in recent years (), as well as the WD, Toshiba and especially Hitachi's better reliability, albeit more expensive. Toshida and WD do have a 6TB external HDD (the external is which is what I really wanted) but they're not for sale in my country yet, they're only available from online websites, and I mistrust buying such sensitive products online. If WD and Toshiba already had 8TB versions I wouldn't even look at Seagate; they'd were more expensive but I'd have more peace of mind.

I feared few people would already have the 8TB HDD since it's relatively new and not everyone buys such big drives. But any piece of info and advice is welcome.

[Renegade334]

I'm afraid only people who work in enterprise (and work on the server racks) or are building their own NAS box (either a massive library chock-full of media files or a private, RAID-based web server) would commit to such an investment. 8TB drives, no matter how low the $/gigabyte ratio, will still make your wallet weep.

Most people nowadays are okay with the 2TB drives that are just about standard and ubiquitous on the market. I myself have three WD Caviar Green 2TB drives inside my rig, on top of a Samsung 850 SSD (containing the system partition, it goes without saying)...and that's not counting at least two other 2TB external drives that are permanently disconnected and unpowered (I fill them exclusively with stuff I want preserved, yet will only access once in a hundred blue moons).

And, no, I didn't buy my PC with THAT configuration...I just started filling it up with drives as the years trickled by and my need for more storage (partition image backups, especially) grew.

[tugatosmk]

Originally Posted by Renegade334

I'm afraid only people who work in enterprise (and work on the server racks) or are building their own NAS box (either a massive library chock-full of media files or a private, RAID-based web server) would commit to such an investment. 8TB drives, no matter how low the $/gigabyte ratio, will still make your wallet weep.

Most people nowadays are okay with the 2TB drives that are just about standard and ubiquitous on the market. I myself have three WD Caviar Green 2TB drives inside my rig, on top of a Samsung 850 SSD (containing the system partition, it goes without saying)...and that's not counting at least two other 2TB external drives that are permanently disconnected and unpowered (I fill them exclusively with stuff I want preserved, yet will only access once in a hundred blue moons).

And, no, I didn't buy my PC with THAT configuration...I just started filling it up with drives as the years trickled by and my need for more storage (partition image backups, especially) grew.

My data storing isn't that different, I have a few HDDs, especially externals, that have their own purpose. But some of them are for the same thing: multimedia. And I wanted to put all of that in the same HDD in order to try and reduce the lack of organization (one show is in one HDD, another one is in another HDD, all external, they have to be powered on individually). But I do want them in external HDD, to try reduce the chance of hacking and privacy issues.

You mentioned the NAS. I thought NAS was intended for those who wanted RAID configurations for double or triple backup in multiple HDD. I'd also like backup for all my multimedia, but there's no budget for that, sadly. Do you think NAS applies to my situation?

[Renegade334]

NAS is really server stuff, so if there's only one access point/client (AKA your computer), there is no point to it and I suggest sticking with non-NAS setups. As for RAIDs, yeah, depending on the configuration it either duplicates the files or divides it -AKA "stripes it"- across several HDDs.

However...
1. In the former case (RAID 1), it means that if you want to preserve a total of 2TB of files, you need 2 x 2TB drives...in other words, you sacrifice 2TB you could have exploited to store 2TB's worth of extra data.
2. In the latter, if there is no parity (RAID 0), the loss of even ONE hard drive means the data striped across all other HDDs becomes unrecoverable. And even if parity IS on (RAID 2 and upwards), rebuilding the lost data (whenever a component drive fails and gets replaced by a fresh, blank one) can take some time (not to mention: the rest of the array is unusable until the automated rebuilding process is complete).

For RAID 4->6, 1+0 and 5+0, you need to buy several HDDs (RAID 4, IIRC, requires a mininum of 3 drives, unless I'm mistaken) to build the array, then there's all the data distribution stuff...and, personally, it's a lot of hassle. RAID exists in order to ensure data persistence and survivability, so unless you're using the drives in a intensive manner or wish to share their contents on a network (either a website or an intranet), dabbling with NAS and RAID is an unnecessary pain. It's more useful for companies or private server owners who cannot afford to lose their data, especially when their hard drives are spinning 24/7.

...And there's all the financial aspect of RAID/NAS-building to consider, too. Bring your own vaseline, because they're gonna make it hurt.

Just stick to putting several high-capacity HDDs inside your case and use them sparingly.

[chikorita157]

While big drives are nice, I would never get a Seagate and it seems that people have problems with them failing SMART. I can imagine that they will fall out of the RAID set if used in a NAS given how unreliable SMR is at dealing with random read/write. Still, probably these types of archive hard drives will be good for backups, especially since one won't typically rewrite files, just store files.

For me, I got a WD Mycloud 3 TB a year ago and it does not quite fit my needs since the thing is slow even if it has a WD Red Hard Drives in them. I use it nowadays to store software and such. Now, I have a dedicated server setup that I leave on 24x7 consisting a Mac mini (2014 model) which uses 10w or less under idle or moderate load and a RAID 10 setup with 4 3TB WD Reds in a 4 bay Thunderbolt enclosure. Thunderbolt hard drive enclosures are expensive, but there is more bandwidth (20 GB/s) opposed to USB 3 and you can add more without using USB ports (which all of them are used up). All the hard drives and the computer are plugged to a UPS (about $81 on sale), protecting against surges and outages.

In short, I have 6 TB of usable storage, but I only really used close to 1 TB after copying my Anime from separate portable hard drives, about 40 GBs of photos taken in Cannon RAW format, 300 MB in development stuff, 180 GB in virtual machines and about 120 GB in Time Machine backups with lots of room to grow. Probably when prices from WD Reds 6 TB goes down, I'll probably just do a RAID 1 for redundancy. Yes, this setup is expensive (about $1600 at the end of the day for computer, drives and enclosure, but could be cheaper if one uses just Freenas, Linux, etc), but it gives the most flexibility compared to a NAS since I can run any server, besides a file server or some extra stuff like a Plex media server.

Aside from that, RAID 5 or 6 is generally not a good idea considering how long the rebuild drives can be, especially with bigger drives as there is a slight possibility that another can fail during that time.

[SeijiSensei]

Originally Posted by tugatosmk

Is this technology prone to more serious data loss in case of a power surge than the regular HDD?

An uninterruptible power supply is a very worthwhile accessory once you start having large amounts of data storage. I have an APC since there are Linux utilities that monitor the UPS and shutdown the system gracefully when the power goes out. If you have networked devices, they can run software clients that will shut down the other machines when the power goes out on the computer to which the UPS is attached. All of them have utilities for Windows and Macs as well, of course.

The Linux kernel includes software RAID by default. Some people run home servers consisting of little more than a Raspberry Pi connected to a drive enclosure similar to the system chikorita describes.

[Dante of the Inferno]

The Seagate 8 TB HDD already uses 2nd gen SMR, so I wouldn't worry too much about failure rate. Furthermore, it is marketed specifically as an archive drive, due to the low disc speed (5900 RPM) and helium-filled internals to reduce the sources of friction. Using this as a media center is not particularly recommended, unless most of the video file can be loaded directly into RAM. Maybe if you only use it for movie night now and then, but certainly not your DVR.

[aohige]

Just this week I burned about $1400 to build my new gaming rig, and after much thought I went with a higher price Western Digital 4TB instead of Seagate.

Since a few years ago, buying Seagate has become a risky gamble with so many drive failures in short amount of time, I didn't want to risk it.

[larethian]

Originally Posted by chikorita157

While big drives are nice, I would never get a Seagate and it seems that people have problems with them failing SMART. I can imagine that they will fall out of the RAID set if used in a NAS given how unreliable SMR is at dealing with random read/write. Still, probably these types of archive hard drives will be good for backups, especially since one won't typically rewrite files, just store files.

For me, I got a WD Mycloud 3 TB a year ago and it does not quite fit my needs since the thing is slow even if it has a WD Red Hard Drives in them. I use it nowadays to store software and such. Now, I have a dedicated server setup that I leave on 24x7 consisting a Mac mini (2014 model) which uses 10w or less under idle or moderate load and a RAID 10 setup with 4 3TB WD Reds in a 4 bay Thunderbolt enclosure. Thunderbolt hard drive enclosures are expensive, but there is more bandwidth (20 GB/s) opposed to USB 3 and you can add more without using USB ports (which all of them are used up). All the hard drives and the computer are plugged to a UPS (about $81 on sale), protecting against surges and outages.

In short, I have 6 TB of usable storage, but I only really used close to 1 TB after copying my Anime from separate portable hard drives, about 40 GBs of photos taken in Cannon RAW format, 300 MB in development stuff, 180 GB in virtual machines and about 120 GB in Time Machine backups with lots of room to grow. Probably when prices from WD Reds 6 TB goes down, I'll probably just do a RAID 1 for redundancy. Yes, this setup is expensive (about $1600 at the end of the day for computer, drives and enclosure, but could be cheaper if one uses just Freenas, Linux, etc), but it gives the most flexibility compared to a NAS since I can run any server, besides a file server or some extra stuff like a Plex media server.

Aside from that, RAID 5 or 6 is generally not a good idea considering how long the rebuild drives can be, especially with bigger drives as there is a slight possibility that another can fail during that time.

Speaking of this I just had one of my 4TB Seagate NAS drives failed after 1.5 years. F**k!!!!!! Good thing I used RAID 1 (2x 4TB). But I couldn't rebuild on a spare drive with the Synology DSM for some reason. Good thing I could recover my data with mdadm.

I actually had bad experiences with WD before, but they came together with a DELL-built rig, not my own custom rig. So had been cautious with it sigh. It was only a one-time affair so I will use them again after this experience probably.

But I will never use Seagate again. That was the final chance I gave them. But my 2.5 drives are all good even after 5 years. It's my 3.5 drives that got screwed.

[Renegade334]

The world of desktop HDDs is like a minefield: you never know when it's going to blow up in your face. Every HDD shipped out of the factory comes with very small defects; it's practically impossible to create a perfect unit, there's always a couple sectors that are magnetically weaker than the others and will worsen with time and intense use. So your HDD can fail on you in a year or two, or three...just know it'll fail. Western Digital is no exception to this rule, it is just less vulnerable to Murphy's Law than Seagate judging by the statistics and the sheer number of complaints out there on the Internet.

Additionally, a mechanical drive's moving parts automatically become areas of potential failure. I have witnessed myself a hard drive (a Western Digital Elements) painfully -mechanically- die in front of me: no bad sectors, no compounding CRC errors, no hint whatsoever (for mech. issues, people should monitor the Read/Seek error rate SMART values, that's where it'll show up) that the motor or seeker head was going to go the way of the Old Yeller... And have you ever tried retrieving 2TB worth of data from an HDD that only spins at something like 10% of its normal speed? It took me several days AND a Linux boot CD to salvage its contents (and I almost gave up on the remaining 15% of data due to the sheer amount of time spent on it). XD

For WD, people suggest getting either Caviar Red (RAID/Server) or Black (Gamer HDD) since they are of more premium quality and therefore are likely to last longer without encountering major bumps. I even read one tale about a guy who worked in a company's server farm and reported that WD drives kept failing on him until they replaced everything with Caviar Blacks (not Reds)...and, since then, no more trouble in Shangri-La. Problem is, Reds and Blacks will manhandle your bank account, at least compared to Greens and Blues.

However, Caviar Greens are good because they spin at a lower speed, which means less wear on the moving parts. Since they're the economical model in WD's lineup, they're also less premium in quality, but they're not meant to be used intensively like the Caviar Blue (general-purpose HDD) or Caviar Black (gaming). But they're less insensitive towards your wallet and make excellent storage lockers (with occasional, non-constant access) for stuff you check only every once in a while. Note: Caviar Blue and Black drives are IIRC not available in high-capacity models like 3/4TB; they only go up to 2TB if I'm not mistaken.

Anyway, if you're looking for a drive that will house your system partition and will see lots of workload...the choice is simple: get an SSD (the PCIe models are starting to get really interesting; unfortunately, my motherboard was manufactured before the M.2 port became mainstream, so that is out of the question). Everything else, you stash on mechanical drive(s).

[larethian]

I use 1TB SSDs on my main PC and laptops. But for my NAS, well....... I'll build one when they have bigger sizes.

[aohige]

Originally Posted by Renegade334

The world of desktop HDDs is like a minefield: you never know when it's going to blow up in your face. Every HDD shipped out of the factory comes with very small defects; it's practically impossible to create a perfect unit, there's always a couple sectors that are magnetically weaker than the others and will worsen with time and intense use. So your HDD can fail on you in a year or two, or three...just know it'll fail. Western Digital is no exception to this rule, it is just less vulnerable to Murphy's Law than Seagate judging by the statistics and the sheer number of complaints out there on the Internet.

Well, that is exactly why Western Digital is a better choice to Seagate.
3 more years of factory warranty makes hell of a difference.

So many Seagates fail right outside of the warranty period, whereas with WD you have a peace of mind for couple more years.

For WD, people suggest getting either Caviar Red (RAID/Server) or Black (Gamer HDD) since they are of more premium quality and therefore are likely to last longer without encountering major bumps. I even read one tale about a guy who worked in a company's server farm and reported that WD drives kept failing on him until they replaced everything with Caviar Blacks (not Reds)...and, since then, no more trouble in Shangri-La. Problem is, Reds and Blacks will manhandle your bank account, at least compared to Greens and Blues.

I ordered Black myself, because when you're spending over a grand in a computer upgrade, the difference in price becomes peanuts.

[tugatosmk]

I ended up buying a Toshiba Canvio 6TB, but I'm having some cooling issues, as I refered here: http://forums.animesuki.com/showthre...95#post5749295