Seagate Barracuda LP ST32000542AS 2TB 5900 RPM?

[MrGrumpie]

hmm that's making me think!  I have 3 new ones sitting here and though I've not had problems with the 7 which have been running in my RAID for 24/7 for the last 11 months, I'm dubious now about such a big unraid build with them.  The Samsung F3s are good no?

[Rajahal]

I'm actually using one of the Seagate LPs as my parity drive.  As I mentioned earlier, I was unable to get the firmware to upgrade, so it is still running CC34.  I'm just hoping for the best, hoping that I don't have problems down the road....but I won't be surprised if I do.

 

I think F3s are fine, I'm running one as a data drive I think.  However, it depends on your application.  If you need speed and don't want to use a cache drive, then you'll want to avoid F3s.

[MrGrumpie]

I plan on using a cache drive once I've done the intial migration (11TB of data), after that there'll be occasion writing, but mainly reading (all bluray media)

 

 

[Rajahal]

BluRay encodes or BluRay ISOs?  I know the F3s are fast enough to stream BluRay encodes, but I don't know about high bitrate ISOs (since I don't have any to test).

[MrGrumpie]

Uncompressed blurays, but I don't have them as ISOs (BD folder structures instead).  Are the Samsungs really that slow?

[Rajahal]

Hmm.  Honestly, I don't know.  In my application I haven't noticed any difference between the Samsung F3s and any of the rest of my drives (WD EADS, WD EARS, etc.).  However, all I ever do is stream BluRay encodes of 15 GB at most (not sure of the bitrate).

[PhilH]

Uncompressed blurays, but I don't have them as ISOs (BD folder structures instead).  Are the Samsungs really that slow?

 

I wouldn't worry about it. You can stream a BD folder (uncompressed) thru a 100MB network, much else a gig network. I don't know of a hard drive made that cannot keep up with your network. I regularly stream BD ISO's from IDE drives all of the time. SATA drives have zero problems.

 

Phil

[terrastrife]

i suspect the issue with teh LP's firmware update is with your hardware, kind alike how SSDs required a lot of motherboards to be updated.

 

I have 2 one on an nforce500 and another on the saslpmv8 both worked fine, no updates or anything.

 

personally i would be going samsung F4EG's right about now. the only 4k drives that arent a hassle. they also do very fastr seqential writes (about 140MB/sec at teh start of the disk slowing down to about 90MB at the end) which combinend with a fast parity means your write speeds need no cache.

[MrGrumpie]

I thought there were issues with the F4s with unRAID?

[mbryanr]

personally i would be going samsung F4EG's right about now. the only 4k drives that arent a hassle. they also do very fastr seqential writes (about 140MB/sec at teh start of the disk slowing down to about 90MB at the end) which combinend with a fast parity means your write speeds need no cache.

 

Since those drives are looking for the starting sector at 64, and unRAID starts at 63, there will be alignment issues.  No jumpers to correct this like the WD 4K Drives...actually the F4s are unusable if you consider write performance. See linked thread below.

 

I thought there were issues with the F4s with unRAID?

 

Correct

[kenoka]

I'm actually using one of the Seagate LPs as my parity drive.  As I mentioned earlier, I was unable to get the firmware to upgrade, so it is still running CC34.  I'm just hoping for the best, hoping that I don't have problems down the road....but I won't be surprised if I do.

 

I think F3s are fine, I'm running one as a data drive I think.  However, it depends on your application.  If you need speed and don't want to use a cache drive, then you'll want to avoid F3s.

I'm also running a Seagate LP as my parity, and I tried the Seatools update, and it said my drive wasn't eligible. I was in too much of a hurry at the time to research and look for the "force" method. Can I take the drive out now and try the force method? It seemed it wasn't data destructive, but I'm hesitant.

 

I'm seeing writes at 25-30 MB/s. I saw someone post that the Hitachis are getting upwards of 40 MB/s. Is this due to the formatting issue, or just the difference between 5900RPM vs. 7200RPM? I'm not planning to go to 7200RPM drives, but it would be nice if I got to within 10-15% of the performance of the 7200RPM drives, which I think should be the case. 30-35 MB/s would be nice.

 

Has anyone who is using the Seagate 2TB LP drive as parity run the CC35 firmware? If so, I'd love to hear your write speeds.

[neilt0]

I'm also running a Seagate LP as my parity, and I tried the Seatools update, and it said my drive wasn't eligible. I was in too much of a hurry at the time to research and look for the "force" method. Can I take the drive out now and try the force method? It seemed it wasn't data destructive, but I'm hesitant.

 

I forced mine while it had data on (that was backed up). It worked, and was non-destructive: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=7402.msg72776#msg72776

[SSD]

I do not think that the firmware update provides any sort of performance increase.

[terrastrife]

personally i would be going samsung F4EG's right about now. the only 4k drives that arent a hassle. they also do very fastr seqential writes (about 140MB/sec at teh start of the disk slowing down to about 90MB at the end) which combinend with a fast parity means your write speeds need no cache.

 

Since those drives are looking for the starting sector at 64, and unRAID starts at 63, there will be alignment issues.  No jumpers to correct this like the WD 4K Drives...actually the F4s are unusable if you consider write performance. See linked thread below.

 

I thought there were issues with the F4s with unRAID?

 

Correct

 

i only store massive files, my average file size is over 1GB so its not a real issue for me, would be if you store lots of small stuff though.

 

i suppose thats fine for me though, dunno about other ppl

[MrGrumpie]

I finished building my unraid server today, which as of writing has 3 of these drives in it along with some Samsung F3s.  I connected an old IDE DVD-rom to the motherboard, set the BIOS to boot from this drive, and burnt the .ISO image to CD.  Each time I tried to boot from it I kept getting the message that there was nothing valid to boot from.  Anyone come across this, and knows how to get round it?

 

Tomorrow I think I may well take the Seagates out of my server and put them into my main PC, and try it from there (bit of a hassle though).

 

I have 2 drives on CC34, 1 on CC32 and 7 drives in my current NAS on CC32

[Joe L.]

I know of no ISO image for unRAID.  What were you trying to boot?

[eroz]

I know of no ISO image for unRAID.  What were you trying to boot?

I think heis talking about the Seagate firmware updater.

 

Make sure that your dvd-rom is the first boot priority in your bios and you only have seagate drives that you want to update attached to your sata ports.  If that does not work, how exactly did you burn your iso to dvd.

[kenoka]

I finished building my unraid server today, which as of writing has 3 of these drives in it along with some Samsung F3s.  I connected an old IDE DVD-rom to the motherboard, set the BIOS to boot from this drive, and burnt the .ISO image to CD.  Each time I tried to boot from it I kept getting the message that there was nothing valid to boot from.  Anyone come across this, and knows how to get round it?

 

Tomorrow I think I may well take the Seagates out of my server and put them into my main PC, and try it from there (bit of a hassle though).

 

I have 2 drives on CC34, 1 on CC32 and 7 drives in my current NAS on CC32

Did you mean you set it to boot from the DVD, or from the Seagate drive? You should have set it to boot from the DVD drive. If you did, make sure you check boot priority, and also verify the drive works, and that the CD was a clean burn. Finally, make sure your burning software created a bootable CD.

[MrGrumpie]

I set the server to boot from the DVD drive, but maybe I burnt it incorrectly?  I just burnt it using the windows in-built burner....just a drag n drop then write.  Am I missing something obvious?

 

Also, do I really need to disconnect every other drive?

[Joe L.]

Yes, you probably created a data DVD with an ISO file on it.

 

What you want is a bootable DVD that is an image of the ISO file.  (a very different thing indeed)

 

Joe L.

[MrGrumpie]

Sorted, thanks   Burnt it with roxio burn on my laptop in the end, put it in the main PC and it booted fine

 

My 2 x new 2TB LPs needed the firmware to be forced, but my older CC32 drive (bought it a year ago as a spare for my RAID5 NAS) auto updated.  Was quick and easy in the end, each drive only took about 1 minute from start to finish.  I have 7 of these LP drives in my NAS, but I'm loathe to update the firmware in them until I've copied most of the content over into my unraid server.

 

These have been running for 11 months now, some of them do click occasionally though no failures so far.  I'll naturally update the firmware before them going into my unraid...but will the life of them have been shortened because they've been running for months on CC32 (with the odd click here and there?).

[mikechy]

For those of you running the Seagate 2TB LP drives.  What are your read rates?  I'm having real trouble getting over 25Mb/sec.  All I have in my unRAID array are these drives.

 

[MrGrumpie]

How do you measure read rates?  I can stream 2 x uncompressed BluRay rips simultaneously with lossless audio with no problems.  25MB/s sounds very low!

[Jomp]

For those of you running the Seagate 2TB LP drives.  What are your read rates?  I'm having real trouble getting over 25Mb/sec.  All I have in my unRAID array are these drives.

 

 

From a Seagate ST32000542AS in my array to a Hitachi HTS725050A9A364 7200rpm 2.5" laptop drive I get a solid 45MB/sec copy. You're way low for just reading data.

[MrGrumpie]

Hang on, are we talking read or write speeds?