*** SEAGATE 5TB EXTERNALS - MYSTERY SOLVED ***


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Who knows, by Nov WD may release an 8TB PMR Red  :)

Reading this thread, it would have been useful if people had mentioned the model of the drive they were discussing because some people were talking about a conventional drive while some were discussing an SMR drive. There are several 5 TB Seagate drives available at the moment, each designed for a particular application. The only one that uses SMR technology has "AS" in its model number, such as ST5000AS001. They work very well in external USB cases and it isn't Seagate's fault if people break open the cases and use the drives as they were never intended to be used. The ST5000DM000, in contrast, is a conventional non-shingled drive.

 

If the ST5000DM000 is not SMR, I wonder why people are having odd performance issues with them which seem to be related to the SMR tech? Unless the performance issues are nothing to do with SMR in the first place, because these drives are PMR? :D

 

To confuse things further, here is "legit" reviews with their review of the ST5000DM0000, stating it's SMR. Ahhh, gotta love the total confusion. I have no idea either way what type of drive it is.

 

http://www.legitreviews.com/seagate-barracuda-st5000dm000-5tb-desktop-hard-drive-review_161241

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Identifying a drive inside an external enclosure can be extremely difficult. When Seagate EOL'd the Makara 5TB, a huge number became available at very nice pricing, "forcing" me to get a truckload of 5TB drives instead of larger drives. At least one reporter in this thread states they got the 7200rpm drive, which would be the Makara. Many will remember the Costco Seagate 4TB Backup Plus drives, on which the packaging gave a clue as to which drive might be inside by looking at which version of Windows it was compatible! of all things :)

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Identifying a drive inside an external enclosure can be extremely difficult. When Seagate EOL'd the Makara 5TB, a huge number became available at very nice pricing, "forcing" me to get a truckload of 5TB drives instead of larger drives. At least one reporter in this thread states they got the 7200rpm drive, which would be the Makara. Many will remember the Costco Seagate 4TB Backup Plus drives, on which the packaging gave a clue as to which drive might be inside by looking at which version of Windows it was compatible! of all things :)

 

In the case of the Backup Plus/Expansion, we know what drive it is. There just seems to be some disagreement about whether it's a PMR or SMR drive there.

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Identifying a drive inside an external enclosure can be extremely difficult. When Seagate EOL'd the Makara 5TB, a huge number became available at very nice pricing, "forcing" me to get a truckload of 5TB drives instead of larger drives. At least one reporter in this thread states they got the 7200rpm drive, which would be the Makara. Many will remember the Costco Seagate 4TB Backup Plus drives, on which the packaging gave a clue as to which drive might be inside by looking at which version of Windows it was compatible! of all things :)

 

In the case of the Backup Plus/Expansion, we know what drive it is. There just seems to be some disagreement about whether it's a PMR or SMR drive there.

 

Actually, you don't know. As seen previously, there may not be one drive used for all of the Backup Plus/Expansion. Seagate has been know to ship multiple drives under the same labeling, including this case

 

Seagate could easily have shipped PMR and SMR drives under the Backup Plus/Expansion label.

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Identifying a drive inside an external enclosure can be extremely difficult. When Seagate EOL'd the Makara 5TB, a huge number became available at very nice pricing, "forcing" me to get a truckload of 5TB drives instead of larger drives. At least one reporter in this thread states they got the 7200rpm drive, which would be the Makara. Many will remember the Costco Seagate 4TB Backup Plus drives, on which the packaging gave a clue as to which drive might be inside by looking at which version of Windows it was compatible! of all things :)

 

In the case of the Backup Plus/Expansion, we know what drive it is. There just seems to be some disagreement about whether it's a PMR or SMR drive there.

 

Actually, you don't know. As seen previously, there may not be one drive used for all of the Backup Plus/Expansion. Seagate has been know to ship multiple drives under the same labeling, including this case

 

Seagate could easily have shipped PMR and SMR drives under the Backup Plus/Expansion label.

 

Could have. But as far as I'm aware ALL 5TB Backup Plus and Expansion are ST5000DM000. Whether that is a PMR or SMR drive I don't know.

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  • 5 months later...

Some people come on and say the drives work just fine for them and over the years this really caused me to lose some hair.. Until by chance I found someone complaing about a drive they had to install into their raid system. It was an expensive server room system and the guy worked for a wel known networking company and they could not get the exact same drive from where they got the original and sso he got one from another place with the same model numbers, Now I already had 2 of these very same drives as well and I only had high opinions on their performance and lack of heat.. but he said the performance on his system dropped to 20% of normal once he installed the single replacement drive. Removing the drive got the performance back up even though the system was missing part of the raid system. The model numbers were identical.. BUT the firmware were an unknown.. There was a complaint on the seagate forum about the drives with this particular firmware having speed issues.. Just 1 message.. Google did not have much to offer..  These were 2TB drives.. They got over 200mb/read/writes and run under 40C without any fans.

 

Since I had the 3TB drive showing all the problems mentioned above I checked the firmware and it looked similar to the 2TB drive the tech from SMC mentioned.... Not the regular firmware that people mention all over the net.. Seagate forums changed a few years ago because too many of us were talking about this minkey business on there. Now you can barely find any real world info on there. And its shame because there were many wh knew data/disaster recovery using specialised tools and programs and offering their help. Maybe seagate wated to stop this user fixing the problems as data recovery seems to be big busienss for them. In the vast majority of cases fixing the drive means snipping a lead for the thermister that shorts the power lines.. Fixes 50% of the dead drive problems in a few seconds..

 

ST2000DM001-1CH164 xxx2MELK        Firmware : CC24

ST3000DM001-1E6166-xxx49VAH        Firmware : SC48

 

That would be the only difference you notice.. One drive performs fantastic.. The other one drops writes to 30MB/sec.. has NO NCQ.. and speeds vary depending... Reads are 100-150MB's.. I thought it was SMR since a power failure will cause adjacent files to get corrupted.. But since SMR drives have an AQ I suppose it is not an SMR.. But who knows..

 

I also have 10 other 2TB drives I got which have all kinds of different model numbers and firmware and some perform better than others.. But I dont rely on what other people experience since my experience is vastly difefrent and as I said, particular model numbers I have perform very well.. and particular ones perform very poorely.. enough to make me not want to take a chance and pay a little extra and get a drive that I know will not be different than the informaton I learn from others..

 

 

 

 

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Who knows, by Nov WD may release an 8TB PMR Red  :)

Reading this thread, it would have been useful if people had mentioned the model of the drive they were discussing because some people were talking about a conventional drive while some were discussing an SMR drive. There are several 5 TB Seagate drives available at the moment, each designed for a particular application. The only one that uses SMR technology has "AS" in its model number, such as ST5000AS001. They work very well in external USB cases and it isn't Seagate's fault if people break open the cases and use the drives as they were never intended to be used. The ST5000DM000, in contrast, is a conventional non-shingled drive.

 

If the ST5000DM000 is not SMR, I wonder why people are having odd performance issues with them which seem to be related to the SMR tech? Unless the performance issues are nothing to do with SMR in the first place, because these drives are PMR? :D

 

To confuse things further, here is "legit" reviews with their review of the ST5000DM0000, stating it's SMR. Ahhh, gotta love the total confusion. I have no idea either way what type of drive it is.

 

http://www.legitreviews.com/seagate-barracuda-st5000dm000-5tb-desktop-hard-drive-review_161241

 

I know years ago facebook tried out SMR drives and only 2TB drives were released at the time, Seagate only came out 2 years later and said they had shipped many millions of SMR drives.. Yet SMR drives were not available until they released the archive 8TB drives..  So I am sure they tested SMR with all capacities since 2TB onwards but did not generally sell them to the public. I think you can find the seagate PR release from years ago saying they had shipped millions of SMR drives.. I am sure they have not sold millions of 8TB drives even now.. So these millions are from all the data centers testing these drives out. Some even put put some reports on write once and read many data for large number of pictures and stuff..

 

The model number ST5000DM000 is given for these.. But I bet the firmware would be like SC49.. But in the picture it says CC46 which is a normal PMR firmware.. So either they are now even using similar firmware on both or the picture is from a different drive.. so there is no way to actually tell the different drives.. as the model/serial were similar and only firmware was different before.. But the crystal diskinfo also shows NCQ enabled and matches the firmware..  so I really am confused.. This to my knowledge is not an SMR drive. This makes everything even more confusing..

 

I had forgotten to mention some of these drives used ADVANCED format sectors which means they emulate 512byte sectors but use 4096byte sectors internally.. Some of the problems could also be because of this.. I specifically partitioned the drives on 16MB boundaries even though microsoft says they automatically use 4K boundary settings.. It did fix some of the read speed problems I had experienced.. Using 1mb boundary did not fix it and I gt tired of just playing with it.

 

 

 

http://www.legitreviews.com/seagate-barracuda-st5000dm000-5tb-desktop-hard-drive-review_161241#

...This public service announcement by Legit Reviews could be over right now, but we went a step further and got our hands on a Seagate ST5000DM000 5TB drive and took a look at the performance of it. The Seagate SR5000DM000 features Seagate Shingled Magnetic Recording, or SMR, to maximize the number of tracks per inch on a single disk. This particular model has four platters (disks) and eight heads. Each platter is able to hold 1.25TB of data.....

 

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Who knows, by Nov WD may release an 8TB PMR Red  :)

Reading this thread, it would have been useful if people had mentioned the model of the drive they were discussing because some people were talking about a conventional drive while some were discussing an SMR drive. There are several 5 TB Seagate drives available at the moment, each designed for a particular application. The only one that uses SMR technology has "AS" in its model number, such as ST5000AS001. They work very well in external USB cases and it isn't Seagate's fault if people break open the cases and use the drives as they were never intended to be used. The ST5000DM000, in contrast, is a conventional non-shingled drive.

 

If the ST5000DM000 is not SMR, I wonder why people are having odd performance issues with them which seem to be related to the SMR tech? Unless the performance issues are nothing to do with SMR in the first place, because these drives are PMR? :D

 

To confuse things further, here is "legit" reviews with their review of the ST5000DM0000, stating it's SMR. Ahhh, gotta love the total confusion. I have no idea either way what type of drive it is.

 

http://www.legitreviews.com/seagate-barracuda-st5000dm000-5tb-desktop-hard-drive-review_161241

 

I know years ago facebook tried out SMR drives and only 2TB drives were released at the time, Seagate only came out 2 years later and said they had shipped many millions of SMR drives.. Yet SMR drives were not available until they released the archive 8TB drives..  So I am sure they tested SMR with all capacities since 2TB onwards but did not generally sell them to the public. I think you can find the seagate PR release from years ago saying they had shipped millions of SMR drives.. I am sure they have not sold millions of 8TB drives even now.. So these millions are from all the data centers testing these drives out. Some even put put some reports on write once and read many data for large number of pictures and stuff..

 

The model number ST5000DM000 is given for these.. But I bet the firmware would be like SC49.. But in the picture it says CC46 which is a normal PMR firmware.. So either they are now even using similar firmware on both or the picture is from a different drive.. so there is no way to actually tell the different drives.. as the model/serial were similar and only firmware was different before.. But the crystal diskinfo also shows NCQ enabled and matches the firmware..  so I really am confused.. This to my knowledge is not an SMR drive. This makes everything even more confusing..

 

I had forgotten to mention some of these drives used ADVANCED format sectors which means they emulate 512byte sectors but use 4096byte sectors internally.. Some of the problems could also be because of this.. I specifically partitioned the drives on 16MB boundaries even though microsoft says they automatically use 4K boundary settings.. It did fix some of the read speed problems I had experienced.. Using 1mb boundary did not fix it and I gt tired of just playing with it.

 

 

 

http://www.legitreviews.com/seagate-barracuda-st5000dm000-5tb-desktop-hard-drive-review_161241#

...This public service announcement by Legit Reviews could be over right now, but we went a step further and got our hands on a Seagate ST5000DM000 5TB drive and took a look at the performance of it. The Seagate SR5000DM000 features Seagate Shingled Magnetic Recording, or SMR, to maximize the number of tracks per inch on a single disk. This particular model has four platters (disks) and eight heads. Each platter is able to hold 1.25TB of data.....

 

There are no 2TB or 3TB SMR disk drives. The Seagate's first million SMR drives were 5TB Kenetic. Like Hitachi's first (and still only) SMR, these are not drop in replacements for SATA disk drives.

 

PS: Shingled (or overlapping) Magnetic Recording (SMR) has been used in tape drives for a long time.

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I don't want to ruffle any feelings, there's enough of that already, but I do want to comment on the discussion above.  (Just my opinion of course ...)  Apart from the attitudes, there's a lot of good information here, useful and helpful.

 

Our community is changing, widening, gathering interest from many sources lately, partly from the VM hype and successes (Linus Tech Tips a big example), and partly from the age and experience of this community and unRAID itself, and the respect it has slowly been gaining.  It's amazing how often when searching Google for an unknown error, unRAID forum links are very prominently listed.  It's hard to search for a disk drive error and not find an unRAID link near the top.  For these reasons, I'd like to see us more welcoming to all, even if they aren't necessarily unRAID users, as I think it adds to our community.  There's good info in the posts above, and it's to our benefit that it's located in our forum not elsewhere.  Users from outside our community have experience we can learn from, and I believe a welcoming hand creates a wider mutual respect, benefiting unRAID in the long run.  We *want* to be a welcoming community, where everyone is treated with respect.  We do ask that newcomers treat us with respect too, and certainly, expressions like "where do you get off" are not acceptable here.

 

Users from outside often do have more 'attitude', not used to the respect we try to show everyone.  But treated with respect, I expect them to soften.  Yes, sometimes we moderators have to deal with users who have proven to be incorrigible, even after warnings, but I hope we are never heavy handed.

 

The discussion above does diverge some, from 5TB Seagates, but it seems too entangled to separate into multiple threads.  Take someone wiser than me to do it.

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Quote from: garycase on August 10, 2015, 01:46:09 PM

Who knows, by Nov WD may release an 8TB PMR Red 

Reading this thread, it would have been useful if people had mentioned the model of the drive they were discussing because some people were talking about a conventional drive while some were discussing an SMR drive. There are several 5 TB Seagate drives available at the moment, each designed for a particular application. The only one that uses SMR technology has "AS" in its model number, such as ST5000AS001. They work very well in external USB cases and it isn't Seagate's fault if people break open the cases and use the drives as they were never intended to be used. The ST5000DM000, in contrast, is a conventional non-shingled drive.

 

 

THAT is what I been trying to say.. The model number does not mean anything. Identical model and part numbers behave differently and this has happened with the 2TB, 3TB and the 5TB.. at least in the 2tb and 3tb's we narrowed it down to the firmware differences and that information is not easily available and in both cases the people involved were very experienced with drives having dealt with hundreds of them. The HDtune graph for the drives are different as well from a regular drive.  Just because of the hostility of some thinking they know a lot I wont even bother spending the time just to have it be deleted. And in 2010/12 when facebook was testing the drives no 5TB or even 4tb drives were available but SMR drives were being tested because anand tech did have an article on it.

Anyway I only signed up because I wanted to get this 5TB and now I wont, the 5TB toshiba I got works just fine normally without having to deal with all this and it has a latency of 11ms compared to the 16ms this one does. You got to buy what ever makes you happy and you are stuck with it. good luck..

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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  • 5 months later...

I have a ST5000DM000 that I shucked from an external more than a year ago.  I've used it in Windows without noticing any issues since then.  Now that I'm moving it to unRAID, I'm having issues:

 

Using the Preclear beta plugin, write speeds would fluctuate from very good (200+ MB/s early, 150+ MB/s mid-way) to poor (30-40 MB/s) to almost nothing with another I/O intensive task running.  Since the Preclear beta plugin was just deprecated, I decided to stop the preclear and install the non-beta.  Once I clicked stop, my server became unresponsive for a little while.  When it came back, the drive in question had dropped out.

 

I've attached the portion of the syslog corresponding to the dropout, along with full diagnostics.  Does this look like a hardware problem, a problem with the Preclear beta plugin, or something else?  I haven't yet rebooted in order to bring the drive back online.  Should I wait a while to allow it to perform any necessary maintenance tasks?

syslog.txt

sf-unraid-diagnostics-20160826-1919.zip

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  • 1 year later...

I've shucked over 40 Seagate External drives. 28x4TB + 5TB and 12x8TB.

The 4 and 5 TB ones were all PMR drives.
The 8TB Backup Plus ones I bought off Amazon were all Seagate 'Compute' PMR drives that run at 200MB/s down to 90MB/s Model number ST8000DM004-2CX188.
The 'identical' Backup Plus 8TB ones I bought off Ebuyer were both Seagate SMR 'Archive' drives that run at 180MB/s down to 30MB/s.

So they use whatever they have that month I think. But Amazon seem to get the faster 'compute' drives. 

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  • 9 months later...

I just bought Seagate Backup Plus 5TB external USB 3 drive. For some reason the external box that contains Seagate Barracuda ST5000LM000 2,5" drive is 1/3 cheaper than the drive alone....

 

After a few minutes the box started to fail and disconnect and could not be connected again. I ran Crystal Disk info and found out that the drive quickly heats to over 55°C inside the box and refuses to work. I extracted the drive and connected it directly to SATA port in my cooled case and the drive worked fine until it reached 40°C after about an hour and random read/write errors started to occur.

 

I placed a pot of cold water on top of the drive so it stayed below 35°C, managed to extract the data, reassembled the box and sent it for RMA. It seems like this drive has some serious heat issues that makes it fail when it heats up...

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On 8/9/2018 at 2:50 PM, hoba_rce said:

I just bought Seagate Backup Plus 5TB external USB 3 drive. For some reason the external box that contains Seagate Barracuda ST5000LM000 2,5" drive is 1/3 cheaper than the drive alone....

 

After a few minutes the box started to fail and disconnect and could not be connected again. I ran Crystal Disk info and found out that the drive quickly heats to over 55°C inside the box and refuses to work. I extracted the drive and connected it directly to SATA port in my cooled case and the drive worked fine until it reached 40°C after about an hour and random read/write errors started to occur.

 

I placed a pot of cold water on top of the drive so it stayed below 35°C, managed to extract the data, reassembled the box and sent it for RMA. It seems like this drive has some serious heat issues that makes it fail when it heats up...

 

Couple things make me doubt this experience. A drive is not going to suddenly start running very hot like that. And second, a drive's heat dissipates mainly from the bottom of the drive, and cold water on top would likely have little affect. Certainly not taking it down to 35C from 55C.

 

It's not clear whether you shucked the drive to use in unRAID. If you didn't, a high temp might be expected. But again, a cup of cold water on top is likely not going to help.

 

But if the drive was failing, returning it for replacement is the right action.

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23 minutes ago, SSD said:

Certainly not taking it down to 35C from 55C.

 

The claim was to taking the temperature down from 40°C to 35°C.

24 minutes ago, SSD said:

and the drive worked fine until it reached 40°C after about an hour and random read/write errors started to occur.

 

24 minutes ago, SSD said:

I placed a pot of cold water on top of the drive so it stayed below 35°C

 

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3 minutes ago, pwm said:

 

The claim was to taking the temperature down from 40°C to 35°C.

 

 

 

Even 40 to 35 is a big drop putting cold water on top, but maybe if it was in a metal pan. I wouldn't do that BTW, could cause condensation issues.

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Just now, SSD said:

 

Even 40 to 35 is a big drop putting cold water on top, but maybe if it was in a metal pan. I wouldn't do that BTW, could cause condensation issues.


Desperate situations may warrant desperate actions. I have placed overheating Seagate USB drives in a Peltier-cooled food cooler just because it was faster/easier to read out the data that way instead of having to spend time to identify exactly what data was on different backups and restore.

 

In the end, the actual heat power emitted isn't very high - likely 8-10W depending on disk model when active. So it doesn't take very much to affect the equilibrium temperature.

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  • 4 months later...
On 12/17/2018 at 4:09 PM, thespooler said:

How are these doing years later?  Now that I'm not SATA port limited, I'm thinking of tossing one of these into my array.  Had 2 for backup, but I dropped one! So the other has been sitting on a shelf for years.

 

You could, of course, simply drop one in your array and use it … if it fails it's no big deal assuming you have a parity protected array (even less of an issue if you're using dual parity).    However, current drives easily achieve 5TB (and higher) without reverting to SMR technology, so I'd be more inclined to just get a new drive if you need the added capacity.    My most recent array has a dozen 8TB HGST drives that work great. 

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  • JorgeB unpinned this topic
  • 1 year later...

Many years later I came here to say I had similar problems. I build a RAID 1 system in a tiny case for home use (needed to be small and quiet), so I opted in to these drives. I bought "Seagate Basic 5TB" USB drives and extracted the HDD inside. They are labelled BarraCuda 5000C500D44C35DC.

Out of first two, one died right away. It was kicked off array and disappeared on linux, and was very slow and unresponsive, under windows, SMART showed hundreds of sectors pending. Replaced it under warranty. Then the two drives worked well in RAID 1 configuration for 9 months or so, however I had a number of power failures and both drives developed errors. One developed "reported uncorrect", the order shows "sectors remapped".

I have decided to bump this up to RAID 5 and bought two more drives few days ago. Wanted replace one of failing drives and add a third one. This needed several days of data sync and after that, one of new drives failed the same way my first one failed - unresponsive, many pending sectors, clicking. The other one seems OK for now.

So now I have to return 3 more drives, which totals at 80% fail rate in 9 months.

Huge waste of my time.

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