Which external 8TB drive should I buy?


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Somewhere here, I thought I'd seen a recommendation of a make/model of 8TB external drive that had a good drive in it that was working well for shucking and installing as a parity or data drive. Unfortunately, my search-fu is failing me and I don't seem to be able to find that thread any more.

 

I was at Fry's yesterday and they have a Seagate Expansion Desktop STEB8000100 model SRD0NF2 for the regular price of $150 which seems pretty reasonable. However, it seems to me that the recommendation was for a WD external.

 

This will have to start life as my parity, as it would be my first 8TB drive. Does anyone have any experience with these Seagate drives? Is the drive in them a decent one for use in unRAID or should I continue my search?

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One important thing with disks is that they can't leave the heads at the same place because the heads are so close to the surface that the turbulence creates surface wear. And at least for the old IBM DeskStar it sucked up lubricants from the surface until the head drowned - the DeathStar moniker was because of a firmware bug where the drive didn't regularly moved the heads to new random positions.

 

But normally the head moves are quite silent since there is no hurry to move the heads on an idle drive - older drives could have quite noisy sounds when they now and then performed a Tcal and the thermo-calibration had to be done with quick head movement speeds to make the drive ready for next read or write request.

 

Anyway - I have much to much fan noise to notice anything.

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12 minutes ago, pwm said:

And at least for the old IBM DeskStar it sucked up lubricants from the surface until the head drowned - the DeathStar moniker was because of a firmware bug where the drive didn't regularly moved the heads to new random positions

Also affected at least Western Digital 2 1/2" drives as recently as 2 years ago.  An install our company did had regular drive failures after about 6 months in service.  Analysis by WD showed "bubbles" in the lubrication for the arms which prevented their easy movement, due to the application very rarely moving the heads and only reading the same file over and over again while being on 24/7.

 

WD actually recommended to switch to SSDs as they weren't planning on fixing a rare issue.

Edited by Squid
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According to an old interview I read with an IBM developer, they had accidentally commented away the function to randomly move the head - so people who used their DeskStar drives never got issues even if they had lots and lots of them, while the idling drives ending up with the click-of-death.

 

The "nice" thing with R&D is that there are millions of ways to fail.

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That likely explains how my IBM DeskStars survived for 10 years, deployed in a Raid-0 setup with constant access, folding at home, downloads, and gaming. They were only put into retirement because SSDs became so damn cheap. It was likely the inability of Windows to stop writing temporary files for every little thing it did like browser caching or updates that likely saved the drives' bacon. :D

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9 hours ago, FreeMan said:

Somewhere here, I thought I'd seen a recommendation of a make/model of 8TB external drive that had a good drive in it that was working well for shucking and installing as a parity or data drive. Unfortunately, my search-fu is failing me and I don't seem to be able to find that thread any more.

 

I was at Fry's yesterday and they have a Seagate Expansion Desktop STEB8000100 model SRD0NF2 for the regular price of $150 which seems pretty reasonable. However, it seems to me that the recommendation was for a WD external.

 

This will have to start life as my parity, as it would be my first 8TB drive. Does anyone have any experience with these Seagate drives? Is the drive in them a decent one for use in unRAID or should I continue my search?

Both the Seagate and WD 8TB externals have been shown to work fine with unRAID.

 

First it was the Seagate SMR, which was speculated to be a poor performer due to the newer SMR technology. However broad use has shown this was just speculation. These drives were especially inexpensive.

Then BestBuy seemed to offer a seemingly endless series of good deals on WD 8TB externals, basically at the same price as the Seagate. This nullified price advantage of Seagate. At first it was common to find RED label drives in the WD externals, but recently this have shifted to whitelabel, with the 3.3V disable feature. This is easily dealt with.

 

Currently, you can use either for good results. Both offer great value.

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Thanks for the links, @c3. I think GaryCase's write up is the one I was thinking of.

 

I just took a quick look at BB's web site - they only have 1 8TB external and it's not a spectacular deal today. I feel like  I need to take a shower now, though. /not a Best Buy fan...

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@BRiT - if that's your idea of "loud", I don't think it's going to be an issue! :)

 

I had to turn the volume almost all the way up and lean in to my speaker to hear it. My wife couldn't hear it across the room. It was definitely softer than the whir of the fan on my computer on my desk.

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Thats not my words as I dont have the drives. Those are the words of people posting on reddit and other forums who do own the units. Some said they had to move their NAS unit out of the current living room because the clicking noises were too loud. Others swapped out the drive for same model and it was better. Some swapped with different brand and were much happier with quieter drives.

 

With things being a noise lottery, if I had my server in a quiet place I'd buy an internal unit directly that I could return if the noise was too much. If its in a typical server location then I dont care about noise.

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  • 8 months later...
On 4/8/2018 at 3:20 PM, HellDiverUK said:

The Seagate external will likely be a Barracuda, which is a SMR unit.  They work fine in unRAID.

 

The general recommendation is the WD externals which usually contain a WD Red (or the white label equivlent).

I have tried many combinations and cant get more than 25 MB/S out of Seagate Baracuda. 

Refer below thread  and if by any chance you can suggest anything then it could be game changer for me. Else all my money spent on these 8 TB drive is waste now. 

 

 

 

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