February 16, 201511 yr Still doing well: Total size: 8 TB Current position: 7.95 TB (99%) Estimated speed: 95.84 MB/sec Estimated finish: 9 minutes The price premium for the 6tb drives is what kept me from bothering with them. And the earlier 8 and 10tb drives were insanely priced if you could even find someone selling them to the proletariat. At $300ish, these new 8tb drives are just a little over double the cost of a 4tb drive. Makes it the logical buy as long as they perform well enough.
February 16, 201511 yr Did some quick write testing. 1 to 10 gig files write at 33-35 MB/s which is about what I was getting before. A group of files in the 30 meg range wrote at 22-25 MB/s. A group of files in the 20 kb range are writing at around 0.6 MB/s. Before jumping on that last one, it's in line with what I'd get before the swap. Writing hundreds of thousands of tiny files is always slow. The smaller the file, the less efficient the overall operation. Anyway, I'm content with what I'm seeing so far.
February 16, 201511 yr Parity check is off to a shocking start. Wait. Did I stop the tiny file write test...Now I have. Parity check is off to a totally predictable start. Total size: 8 TB Current position: 27.26 GB (0%) Estimated speed: 43.51 MB/sec Estimated finish: 3054 minutes Sync errors detected: 0
February 16, 201511 yr Agree that writing lots of small files is slow on any system where you can't force directory write caching. Every file results in both the writing of the file data, and updating of the directory information ... so doing a LOT of these causes an extensive amount of head thrashing as it's going back-and-forth between the directory and the data. All these seeks really slow things down ... and doing it on a shingled drive probably makes it even worse. As for your parity check -- it seems very slow (43MB/s) ... even with your older 2TB drives I'd expect it to be at least double that. Was this before you canceled the writes?
February 17, 201511 yr I don't know why you'd expect it to be faster. It's the same bottleneck. The 4tb drives are nearly done now. Total size: 8 TB Current position: 3.51 TB (44%) Estimated speed: 84.91 MB/sec Estimated finish: 881 minutes Sync errors detected: 0
February 17, 201511 yr Looked a bit closer and realized you're still running some 500GB/platter drives -- the Seagates and possibly the WD's (depending on which specific models they are ... both the EARS and EARX came in both 500GB/platter and 667GB/platter versions). These are indeed pretty slow compared to the newer generation of 1TB/platter units (like your 4TB units).
February 17, 201511 yr And another speed bump on the final phase. I'm going to call this a Great Success and declare the shingled 8tb Seagate drive a perfectly cromulent storage option for unRAID. Total size: 8 TB Current position: 4.2 TB (52%) Estimated speed: 158.99 MB/sec Estimated finish: 399 minutes Sync errors detected: 0
February 17, 201511 yr Indeed (I had to look up cromulent). Once again, data showing the parity drive is not the speed limiting component.
February 17, 201511 yr Looks like all of that speculation about the huge write penalty was premature. Who was it that said we needed a real-world test to tell for sure? Hmmm .... Exciting development in unRAID land! Economical 8T drives bring on a whole new level of data density.
February 17, 201511 yr Yes, it certainly looks like whatever technical mitigations were made to minimize write issues work very well. The speeds are very encouraging -- looks like these will work okay as parity drives ... so an all-8TB array is a reasonable configuration.
February 17, 201511 yr I'm surprised I was the first one to try it and report the results. I think the drives started shipping to consumers in mid-January. I only decided to give it a shot because I was curious and the drive was on sale for a whopping 5% off.
February 18, 201511 yr Actually I haven't seen any that are in-stock for consumers yet. The only way to get one right now is to "shucking" the drives from external enclosures -- a practice many of us choose to avoid due to warranty concerns.
February 18, 201511 yr Actually I haven't seen any that are in-stock for consumers yet. The only way to get one right now is to "shucking" the drives from external enclosures -- a practice many of us choose to avoid due to warranty concerns. I consider that to be in stock. People have been shelling drives ever since externals became cheaper than internals. Even with bare drives available, plenty of people buy an external to save a few bucks. I could have ordered the bare drive but it was $45 more than the external. For $45 in savings, I'll run a full diagnostic before I take it apart and self-insure after that. At current prices, if I buy 9 and 1 fails, I come out ahead. My failure rate experience within the warranty period is far lower than 1 in 9 so I'm comfortable with the risk. Warranty exchanges usually get you a refurb, anyway. Hardly a fair exchange if your drive is only a couple months old.
February 18, 201511 yr Agree that many folks have been shucking drives ever since BackBlaze made the process popular during the disk drive shortages that followed the Thailand flooding in 2011, when they even paid bounties for consumers to shuck drives and send them in. But some of us still don't choose to take that approach ... and for those the drives are still not available.
February 18, 201511 yr These new drives are definitely intriguing. I'm usually a bit behind the curve on the largest drives. I want to see the performance of these drives over the next year before I utilize them. Plus the fact of all the black friday sales had me sweep out all the 2TB drives to 4Tb & 6TB. I may pick up an external as an rsync mirror backup for the 6tb drives. Chances are, I'll wait for the dust to settle and prices to drop.
February 18, 201511 yr Ditto ... the next external I buy will almost certainly be an 8TB. But for my next UnRAID setup, I'll buy the bare drives when they're available.
February 22, 201511 yr Well I did tell people not to guess about the performance of this drive and to actually try it. But seagate is not what I call reliable.
February 23, 201511 yr Going back to the original post title, man am I irritated! USD $260 Retail Announcement. I imagine they were at this price because of the nature of the drive, technology expected use etc. So what happens ..... They are starting on Amazon for USD $329 And here in Australia they are AUD $399 I find this ridiculous. When I talk to my supplier (Good on you Scorptec) I get told "Well, it is an 8TB drive so you expect it to cost more than a 6TB drive". Pointless conversations about technology etc as I can actually hear him turning off - all the suppliers seem to be seeing is 8TB > 6TB so cost should be higher and people will pay it. Spoke to Seagate rep - RRP is still USD $260. I ask, will Seagate sell this direct - answer, don't know. Lets squeeze everyone for everything cent we can. Annoying!!!! Sigh.
February 23, 201511 yr Going back to the original post title, man am I irritated! USD $260 Retail Announcement. I imagine they were at this price because of the nature of the drive, technology expected use etc. So what happens ..... They are starting on Amazon for USD $329 And here in Australia they are AUD $399 I find this ridiculous. When I talk to my supplier (Good on you Scorptec) I get told "Well, it is an 8TB drive so you expect it to cost more than a 6TB drive". Pointless conversations about technology etc as I can actually hear him turning off - all the suppliers seem to be seeing is 8TB > 6TB so cost should be higher and people will pay it. Spoke to Seagate rep - RRP is still USD $260. I ask, will Seagate sell this direct - answer, don't know. Lets squeeze everyone for everything cent we can. Annoying!!!! Sigh. ShopBLT is actually taking pre-orders (shows they have several coming in on 3/13) at close to the suggested retail price and their FAQ says they ship outside the US. Have you tried ordering from them? http://www.shopblt.com/item/seagate-8tb-archive-hard-drive-sata/seagat_st8000as0002~bym5507.html
February 24, 201511 yr I shucked 250GB IDE Maxtors out of their cases, which I used in PCs I built in my spare room. Some of those machine are still running (old Pentium 3 and Athlon XP machines). I was building the best machine I could for a specific budget for people, and buy externals was saving enough to put a better graphics card in the machine (upgrading from a Voodoo 2000 to a Voodoo 3000 for example). BackBlaze did not invent shucking drives.
February 25, 201511 yr I see there's 5TB and 6TB versions of the Archive drive. The 6TB and 8TB versions are listed as Archive HDDv2, the 5TB is listed as Archive HDD. It still seems to use SMR. http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/hdd-fam/seagate-archive-hdd/en-us/docs/archive-hdd-dS1834-3-1411gb.pdf The 5TB drive is similar in price to the normal Desktop.15 5TB.
February 25, 201511 yr The 5TB is v1 which uses a smaller band and gets only 25% increase in density, it's about 2 years old. The newer v2 get 33%.
March 2, 201511 yr I'm pretty happy now. I can order from Amazon with only $15 shipping to Australia! Hoping to use them for my Back-up Server Project. Operational Day to Day Media Server will remain Full of Red's. I'm now trying to decide if I want to buy 3 and use one for Parity (without the evidence to support it will be OK) or just use 3 and don't use Parity as it is Backup. Don't really want to shell out on a faster 8TB (e.g. HGST) drive for Parity! Figure its going to be cold most of the time as it is only backup and I intend to run it once a week - but still!
March 2, 201511 yr I'm pretty happy now. I can order from Amazon with only $15 shipping to Australia! Hoping to use them for my Back-up Server Project. Operational Day to Day Media Server will remain Full of Red's. I'm now trying to decide if I want to buy 3 and use one for Parity (without the evidence to support it will be OK) or just use 3 and don't use Parity as it is Backup. Don't really want to shell out on a faster 8TB (e.g. HGST) drive for Parity! Figure its going to be cold most of the time as it is only backup and I intend to run it once a week - but still! What are you talking about? I just spent days testing and posting my results of the drive in Seagate's USB case, on a SATA port, and in my array as a parity drive. [sigh]
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