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Seagate Archive Drives

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(@expbaby)
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Was wondering if anyone is using 8TB Barracuda Compute or Archive drives in their Raid setups? I've got a Raid 5 now and want to upgrade it to a 4x8TB setup. Some of these drives are PMR or SMR technology.

I've read that you should use a PMR drive setup. What happens if you use the SMR drives in a RAID?

 
Posted : 20/04/2018 4:03 pm
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8008
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The problem with these drives is:
1) you cannot certify them, as they slow dramatically when you try to certify them, so essentially you have no ability to determine if they are truly reliable.
2) Any intense writes drop to 40MB/s pretty quickly.

There is no physical reason they cannot work, just that they are really slow and users complain about this.

 
Posted : 22/04/2018 12:02 am
(@j-a-duke)
Posts: 14
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Was wondering if anyone is using 8TB Barracuda Compute or Archive drives in their Raid setups? I've got a Raid 5 now and want to upgrade it to a 4x8TB setup. Some of these drives are PMR or SMR technology.

I've read that you should use a PMR drive setup. What happens if you use the SMR drives in a RAID?

I'm using the Archive drives (purchased right after they were released) in a couple of different enclosures.

Certifying them is very slow as pointed out, but I waited out the process simply to ensure reliability. Had 1 out of 45 fail, so I think that's on par with other brands/models.

I'm running them in 3- & 4-bay Thunderbolt enclosures as well as Synology 12-bay NAS units.

I also have a good number of Seagate NAS ST8000VN0002 drives in use as well. Those have been decently reliable as well.

And now, there's a third generation Archive drive under the Exos name, Exos 5E8 ( https://www.seagate.com/enterprise-storage/exos-drives/exos-e-drives/).

I'm looking to pick a few up, once they are available at retail, to test.

Cheers,
Jon

 
Posted : 01/11/2018 11:24 am
(@softraid-support)
Posts: 8008
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If you don't mind the slow write performance, then they will work fine. it takes several minutes of writing for the slow write to happen, but I see these drives drop dramatically in write performance.

this slowdown will also affect rebuilds, so while this makes them unusable with hardware RAID they can still work with SoftRAID, as most rebuilds are pretty quick.

In general, though, I don't like archive drives for that reason.

 
Posted : 01/11/2018 5:22 pm
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