Seagate 8TB ARCHIVE HDD 3.5in SATA 5900RPM 128MB - $307.40 @ FreeShippingTech

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Seagate 8TB ARCHIVE HDD 3.5in SATA 5900RPM 128MB - $307.40 @ FreeShippingTech

uzz30 on 10/08/2015 - 12:12 freeshippingtech.com.au (371 clicks)

Ordered mine a week ago and paid $10 more than this price. It arrived in 7 days. Australian seller. 3 year factory warranty.

This is an archive drive, it has comparatively slow write times, but good read speeds. It is good for backups, storing movies, music, photos etc. It will not perform very well in a storage array eg RAID.

Here's a comprehensive technical review and comparison.
http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb

Affordable Active Archive Hard Drives for Cloud Storage

Industry's first high-capacity hard drive designed for cost-effectively storing active archive data and cloud content .

High-density 8TB hard drives for petabytes of affordable and accessible long-term online storage

Enables significant system-level TCO savings with best cost-per-TB
Maximum storage efficiency with lowest watts-per-TB
Reliable, low-power data retrieval based on Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) technology
RV-balanced for high density environments
Cost-Effective High Capacity 8TB Hard Drive
Lowest cost/TB online data archive solution for petabytes of growing archival storage helps to ensure affordable long-term data management.

SMR-enabled technology ensures efficient and economical cold storage operations even in the harshest data center environments.

Energy-Efficient High-Density Cloud Hard Drive

The 3.5-inch Archive HDD is optimized for cold data storage with the lowest power consumption and the on-demand, time-to-ready PowerChoiceTM feature.

Supersized capacity, energy efficiency and lowest TCO

. Seagate brings over 30 years of trusted storage reliability to the growing need for online long-term storage.

. Industry's best cost/GB/watt 8TB hard drive . Engineered for 24?7 workloads of 180TB per year

. Drive down costs with up to 1.33TB-per-disk hard drive technology.

. SATA 6Gb/s interface optimizes burst performance

. Seagate AcuTracT servo technology delivers dependable performance.

. Free Seagate DiskWizardT software allows you to install 5TB, 6TB and 8TB hard drives in Windows without UEFI BIOS.

. Seagate SecureT models provide hardware-based data security and deliver an Instant Secure Erase feature for safe, fast and easy drive retirement.

. Seagate Secure models meet the NIST 800-88 media sanitization specification and also support the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) standards.

Best-Fit Applications

. Cost-effective online archiving

. Object storage

. Big Data cold storage

. Cloud active archive

. Web-scale archiving

Computing 8TB Seagate

19 Aug 2015 6:07pm

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closed Comments

cwongtech on 10/08/2015 - 12:17

How slow are we talking?
- klif-e on 10/08/2015 - 12:20
  
  +3
  
  Suggest you read the storage review article as its not a simple answer.
- uzz30 on 10/08/2015 - 12:25
  
  The linked review has the long answer, but as a short example;
  
  If you are copying a file to it over your home network it will keep up just fine.
Lukian on 10/08/2015 - 12:42

+1

"It will not perform very well in a storage array eg RAID."

If the read speeds are fine and it's used for accessing data only (written once). Why?

Edit: Oh, 57 hour rebuild time vs 20hrs for other products. (two drives only)

"The results for the NAS synthetic analysis is very similar to the sustained synthetic benchmarks in overall placing of the Archive HDD, the read performance was on par with the other drives while the write performance was often lagging. "
- iRMonkey on 10/08/2015 - 12:59
  
  As far as performance goes, it'll be fine if it has comparable read throughput to other drives. The rebuild times is what is hurting the high density drives, definitely got to use RAID-6 as a minimum otherwise you really run the risk of another failure during the week-long rebuild.
atlas on 10/08/2015 - 12:49

I got one of these to backup important data on my NAS. Works well.
- Lukian on 10/08/2015 - 13:01
  
  +1
  
  I have a nas (n40l) to backup our nas.
  - SydShopCat on 10/08/2015 - 13:10
    
    +2
    
    So what do you do if both of those fail? I think you need a third NAS.
    - Lukian on 10/08/2015 - 14:18
      
      Multiple cloud storage (at least for photos), auto-upload apps ftw?
    - Lukian on 10/08/2015 - 14:19
      
      I replace the failed disk(s) or I migrate the disks to another NAS. If the N40L died right now, I'd check mainboard price from HP or go buy a gen8.
    - atlas on 10/08/2015 - 15:47
      
      My 8tb drive lives inside my desktop (which only gets used once or twice a week), so chances of both my NAS (actually a N40L) and the 8tb drive dieing at the same time is pretty remote.
frysie on 10/08/2015 - 12:49

i would just use it for drivepool. which has a redundancy option anyways.
mancheap on 10/08/2015 - 12:58

+1

I purchased one of these a month back, it has a disconcerting chirp I associate with imminent failure.
I hoped to partition it to use as a replacement for a few 2/3tb drives but seems I'm stuck as unlikely a return will be accepted without actual failure, so tread carefully with this drive. I've done some searching and it seems to be a commonplace issue with no error detections - the drives themselves are too new to determine their reliability, but paying $300 for a chirping drive is not something I'm comfortable with.
I've had good experiences with Seagate prior to this model, but this has made the noise since installation.
- frysie on 10/08/2015 - 13:02
  
  the chirping is most likely the drive parking. you can disable this (google is your friend)
  - mancheap on 10/08/2015 - 13:08
    
    The noise occurs repeatedly sometimes a dozen times within 10 seconds, most drives I've experienced this with had a subsequent click of death eventually.
    Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try this but unsure why no other of my 3/4/5tb hd purchases have required this to be disabled.
    - Gnostikos on 10/08/2015 - 20:23
      
      You may want to see my reply below.
      
      This seems to be a trait of the actual design. I've seen numerous mentions from owners of these about the bizarre operating noises these things make.
ToobsAU on 10/08/2015 - 12:58

+3

We use these in our archive nas for write once read many applications… They are good for write bursts of up to around 20GB but beyond that the sustained write performance is terrible, around 25MB/s.
The only time this is an issue for us is during raid rebuilds.

For us the storage density vs price makes it worth putting up with.
Kaboda on 10/08/2015 - 13:36

Lowest price so far ! thanks.

This is the third hard disk of this type I am buying so far no issues.
- atlas on 10/08/2015 - 15:48
  
  I managed to get it for about $270 during the eBay 20% off sale. But this is a pretty good price.
  - Kaboda on 10/08/2015 - 17:14
    
    Yeah I bought one then but right now the cheapest is this.
samfisher5986 on 10/08/2015 - 14:06

Its very easy to get mislead on the speed of these drives.

If you are writing/reading/storing large files you will have a very fast 8TB drive without any issues or slowdowns. Perfect for movies, TV Shows etc.

If you have a lot of small files, you will have fast speeds until the cache on the drive becomes full, then it will slow down because its overloaded with small files.

RAID can also have speed issues, I assume because of the small writes needed.

However its worth noting that there is nothing wrong with using these for RAID if you don't mind the speed issues.
frysie on 10/08/2015 - 14:13

+2

www.stablebit.com/drivepool

this is what im using and its great. Ive moved from RAID -> drivepool with an offsite backup. This along with www.stablebit.com/scanner and … its so good. it emails you when a drive is failing. and if one is on its way out…. it will move the data from that drive to other drives…. :D

you can also get the cloudpool too. which will pool essential backup data to multiple clouds and split them between all your cloud accounts ;)
- atlas on 10/08/2015 - 15:48
  
  +1 for drivepool.
jmone on 10/08/2015 - 15:55

+1

Also works well in DriveBender (and it's an Oz Co) - http://www.division-m.com/drivebender/ Have a couple as a part of my two 40TB Pools and just purchased another from this deal :)
- jmone on 10/08/2015 - 16:02
  
  …and I'd also recommend if using these in pools:
  - Hard Disk Sentinel for monitoring http://www.hdsentinel.com/
  - and for the more adventurous formatting as ReFS over NTFS for Windows 8+ / 2012 builds
  - frysie on 10/08/2015 - 16:50
    
    why? drivepool has an addon (scanner) that does what you mention and its built into drivepool… ie works in tandem
    - jmone on 10/08/2015 - 17:43
      
      DriveBender also have a cut down version of HDS integrated but in general I find HDS a very worthwhile investment for monitoring all drives + the full version gives you a whole heaps of tests (both destructive and non-destructive)
alexGoodwin on 10/08/2015 - 18:43

how reliable is this 8tb hdd? price is good for per tb.

Hate to recover or rebuilt data on such massive disk
- Gnostikos on 10/08/2015 - 20:12
  
  +5
  
  I bought one in June. It died as of yesterday.
  
  The raging debate about the Archive series' drive performance seemed completely unfounded for me. I transferred about 4.7TB onto mine when I got it in 16 hours, averaging 90MB/s or greater (minimum was probably ~20MB/s and it maxxed out at 150MB/s at times). It was on par with other 5400/5900RPM drives like the ST4000DM000 when I benchmarked it with no data (Crystal Disk Mark screens). I have no idea who started the "after 50 consecutive gigabytes of data transfer the throughput drops to something ridiculous like 10MB/s" but that's pure bullsh*t.
  
  The noises this thing makes though when spinning up and in normal operation are unlike anything I've ever heard and are highly alarming; even compared to the many previous Seagate Barracudas I've had.
  
  Yesterday it was in the middle of streaming music when it began making a rapidly clicking/whirring actuator arm noise, disappeared off the face of the Earth (in Windows, Disk Management, the BIOS, all utilities, et al) and now when you plug it in, it simply attempts to spin up 4 times and then stops trying.
  
  From what I've heard the initial production run of these Archive 8TB HDDs was fraught with a very high failure rate but there really aren't enough of these in circulation to know if it's a batch issue or a technology/design issue with Shingled Magnetic Recording.
  
  Personally, I'm done experimenting and will be going back to non-SMR HDDs permanently.
  - alexGoodwin on 10/08/2015 - 20:31
    
    Thank you so much for the heads-up. almost click the buy button.
    
    You save me and lots of others time, money and headaches!
    - Gnostikos on 10/08/2015 - 20:44
      
      +1
      
      I will also say, I used mine sparingly after the initial massive data dump but it was not kept online, 24/7. I disconnected it after backing up every few days or so and literally used it as cold, off-line storage.
      
      I'm not sure whether that exacerbated things but funnily enough prior to my Archive 8TB HDD failing, I had two Seagate ST4000DM000s pried from External enclosures. One had 233 days in total of power-on hours, and the other less than 8 days. I was using one as an off-line backup of the other, hence the extremely low power-on hours count for the latter.
      
      Guess which one failed?
      
      The one least used of course.
  - cwongtech on 11/08/2015 - 09:45
    
    I have no idea who started the "after 50 consecutive gigabytes of data transfer the throughput drops to something ridiculous like 10MB/s" but that's pure bullsh*t.
    
    My WD Red NAS 4TB drive write speed dropped to 0MB/s after 2.19TB/4TB capacity.
    Got a replacement drive and it doesn't do that.
    
    Probably a high chance of lemons?
    - samfisher5986 on 11/08/2015 - 11:58
      
      No, its a valid thing.
      
      After the drive fills its cache it will be very slow while it clears the cache.
      
      The cache only gets filled when you transfer a lot of small files. Large files have no issue.
    - cwongtech on 11/08/2015 - 12:13
      
      @samfisher5986:
      Well mine was a dud for sure, I used it like a normal drive, after restarts and such it refused to write anything over 2.19/4TB.

This was posted 8 years 8 months 17 days ago, and might be an out-dated deal.