Seagate Archive 5Tb ST5000AS0001

[Squazz]

So, I've seen that quite a few people are running Seagate Archive drives, and seem to be happy with the drives.

 

But, that is confusing me. Won't the fact that they are SMR drives be quite a problem when replacing a dead drive, or just introducing them to the array?

Right now I have 40Tb (8x5TB ST5000AS0001) worth of drives sitting on a shelf, as I don't want to introduce them to my UnRaid array if they turn out to be quite a hassle to work with.

I tried to replace a 3Tb WD RED (WD30EFRX) with one of my Archive drives, and it quickly went from acceptable to 10MB/s. For a 5TB drive, 10MB/s is never gonna cut it. At that speed, they are probably never gonna get introduced to the array before another drive dies.

So, in the end my question might be. What am I doing wrong?
If people are happy with their 8Tb Seagate Archive drives, then why does it seem that I am getting speeds as 10MB/s? 

[JorgeB]

That is a 1st gen Seagate SMR drive, never had one but remember reading write performance isn't great, 2nd gen Seagate drives like the ST8000AS0002 usually perform well enough with Unraid, the ones I have are about as fast as normal CMR drives for most cases, Toshiba and WD SMR drives (and possibly other Seagate models) don't perform as well, I have an array with Toshiba drives that frequently slows down to 5MB/s for writes.

[Squazz]

34 minutes ago, JorgeB said:

That is a 1st gen Seagate SMR drive, never had one but remember reading write performance isn't great, 2nd gen Seagate drives like the ST8000AS0002 usually perform well enough with Unraid, the ones I have are about as fast as normal CMR drives for most cases, Toshiba and WD SMR drives (and possibly other Seagate models) don't perform as well, I have an array with Toshiba drives that frequently slows down to 5MB/s for writes.

I was thinking the same thing. But, when looking up excactly that series, I found this reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/2vxboz/comment/cp6umlc/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

As soon as sustained writes gets past 30GBs the write speed tanks (people say it flattens out at 27MB/s. Which it always will when it is introduced to Unraid. 

 

So, I am still curious what the actual experience is by the people who are using these Archive drives. And, wonder if anyone has ever replaced an existing drive with a archive drive?

 

[JorgeB]

11 hours ago, Squazz said:

the actual experience is by the people who are using these Archive drives

Like mentioned my experience with this particular model is that they work with Unraid basically as CMR drives, I've transferred more than 1TB continuously without any write slowdowns, they also work full speed during a parity sync or disk rebuild. 

[ConnerVT]

On 5/30/2022 at 3:19 AM, JorgeB said:

they also work full speed during a parity sync or disk rebuild. 

 

Would that include if the disk being rebuilt *is* the SMR drive?  For I would think writing several TB to a SMR drive would end up being really slow after a short period of acceptable transfer speed.

[JorgeB]

10 hours ago, ConnerVT said:

Would that include if the disk being rebuilt *is* the SMR drive? 

Yes, also remembered there's already a thread about those drives with lots of actual data: