Similar Deal at Other Retailers:
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/673328
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/676911
They have the 8TB Barracuda at $189~.
Mwave has brought the price down to $179. Found on their clearance sale page.
Delivery at $5.99 flat rate is only for metro areas.
SMR
5,400 RPM
SATA 6Gb/s
Havent used it, but based on the RPM I'd want these set up in a RAID array with at least some sort of read/write improvement to get decent throughput.
Wouldn't SMR be risky for raid
risky how?
SMR is great for some workloads (large files that are read sequentially, videos for example), terrible for others (web server running a database backend with 1000 simultaneous users). I don't think RAID changes that equation very much.
@abb: RAID is operating on a block level, which these drives do not provide. When you're writing to SMR drive your data gets written to temporary CMR portion of the disk and then gets moved to SMR part. Basically you never know where your data is and relying only on internal translation table. And when you fill up your CMR area then things get real nasty.
@abb: SMR hope you never want to rebuild an array. Running into these issues with WD, had a RMA on a failed drive and they replaced it with a SMR version. Had to send it back at my cost. But it would take long and fail the rebuild, with SMR drive.
@abb: Do you know if PS4 has inside an SMR? I want to upgrade and can find only SMR at reasonable price
@Laziofogna: It'll be fine. PS4s aren't RAID nor do they have sensitive data on them, although I have no idea about this specific drive's compatibility with the console.
@Chaffix: No this wouldn't fit, I was just wondering about the SMR since I recently found out are not well seen
https://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/674322
Not exactly WD elements, but there was this during boxing day..
Also, be wary of the ones from Amazon UK: https://www.ozbargain.com.au/comment/11541354/redir
Why be wary of the UK ones?
returning is hassle if something goes wrong.
I have a 4TB SMR drive in my Unraid server. When a parity check is running the first 4TB is really slow and then it speeds up a lot for the remaining 12TB which are CMR drives.
YMMV but do some reading into SMR vs CMR.
$/TB isn't wildly different.
I have these drives (2 of them) in my Unraid server and I would strongly urge you people looking to use these in a NAS type scenario to reconsider and use SMR instead.
reconsider and use SMR instead
The ST8000DM004 is an SMR drive
@dealman: Sorry, I meant to write CMR on my post and it won't let me edit as it's been responded to. SMR get very slow on large writes. Anything that you are writing a lot of data too can become painful. Reads are OK but your writes will be potentially slammed under large workloads. So if it was me, I wouldn't put these into a NAS.
Don't use SMR (drives with Shingles) for RAID. They're OK for the occasional backup, but little else, unless you like very slow writing speeds.
Barracuda SMR isnt slow at all. It is only slow when it's almost full. It's perfectly fine for a Archival grade / read-many drive.
I have 8 greens set up for my media server for last 8 years. Perfectly fine.
these are not for NAS's don't buy these for a NAS.
Is this drive good for Surveillance system??
Most certainly not.
What's the minimum type for surveillance NVR setup?
WD Purple or Seagate SkyHawk.
SMR drives are so-called archive drives, you write to it and put it to shelf. Usual CMR drives are mostly read operations, surveillance drives are mostly writes. While hardware in all three is pretty much identical, the way firmware processes data is different, surveillance drives are optimized for writing stream of data which does not require much of normal integrity and validation so they will be working faster and more reliably.
Is it just me or are the same questions raised over and over each time a hard drive, CPU, motherboard, graphics card is posted?
Just an idea, maybe if there was a part number field in the deal posting, that if matched against a wiki could then link to an ozbargain based wiki where these common questions are answered giving ozbargainers a quick link to technical resources at their fingerprints (not suggesting people are too lazy to do some research online with a google/bing etc search).
Yes, it's an SMR drive, its best suited as an archive drive and it's slow in random read/writes. There is a reason HD manufacturers have drives designed for purposes such as NAS, surveillance etc and you should get the right drive for the purpose rather than trying to save a buck and then complain about performance or issues.
I mean yes, perhaps you are correct, but why does there have to be a specific ozbargain wiki with all the effort and overhead of that … When there's so many good resources a simple Google search away that will tell you all the same things about tech like SMR?
In other words: Why won't some dopes just google the question first?
I was thinking more like a 'vetted' wiki entry, where contributors who are specialists in the field can provide technical information so instead of going to 10 different websites, you get a curated summary of what you need to know. If people want to then further investigate they can. Of course, ozbargain is about saving money (and money is generated by spending time working) so not only does ozbargain save you money, but it also can save you time when researching information by providing byte-sized information morsels.
i.e:
Use Cases:
Can I use this in a NAS? Yes, but there are a few factors that make the drive not ideal for NAS use. The drive uses SMR that causes random read/write operations to be noticeably slower than drives using CMR methods. The drive has a power-on hours rating of 2400 meaning it is not designed for 24/7 use and it has a data duty rate of 55Tb per year meaning exceeding this may cause the drive to fail.
Yes there is also the timeout issue when a drive can lock it self up while trying to correct a block….
I get what you're saying, but if I google 'SMR NAS' I get so many results basically saying the same thing.
Same question, and people can choose to answer or move on.
Why I'm on Ozbargain not just for the deals but also for helping people out, And most of my posts come from others helping me out on the same previous deal of the same item, . basically were bumping the same questions and answers over and over and the fun is the conversations we have in these re-posts, yes we could also do the same as you suggested
Great timing thanks 👍
its not a very fast drive but it will do for being a backup drive.
Seagate trash will most likely start clicking and die within 2 years. Not worth the hassle.
Personally have had Seagate drives for 4-5+ years with minimal perf loss or deaths. But i suppose it is the luck of the draw and use case
I've not bought a HDD for about 5 years but I stopped buying Seagate due to high failure rates in my own experience.
WD seemed far more reliable for me.
I find their consumer drives to be utter trash, but I've had very good experiences with their NAS drives.
Meanwhile on WD I find the opposite, their NAS "Red" drives are SMR whilst their consumer drives are pretty okay.
I have a fairly basic understanding of hard drives. Currently got a old 1TB WD Blue in my computer (not used as a boot drive - have a separate 1TB SSD for that), mainly use for large programs or movies, music etc. that don't have to load fast.
If I want to replace that 1TB Blue, is this a good option or not?
This drive is certainly slower compared to say my USB WD Elements external 8tb drive but I purely use these drives for once of storage (same as you movies etc) and packed away till needed for reading (so I aim 1st for cheapest per TB), I think the WD blue is slightly faster but these are certainly fine for storage,. suggest if you have a drive in your PC,. set in windows settings to power down hard drive when not in use to reduce wear and tear on hard drive
Do you know why taxi car engines can go for half a million km without rebuild and same engines in family car sometimes can barely do 100K? Same principle applies to hard drives.
…. And what principle is that? Maintenance? Doesn't seem to apply to HDDs.
@Grazz989: Maintenance? Of course not. Start-stop cycles and associated thermal expansion and contraction is what killing both car engines and electronics. Taxi engine runs longer because it almost never off.
I had a few of these for few years, they run fine as single drives if you need to backup large files. Not ideal for RAID applications, drive gets excruciatingly slow once its nearly full (bit like a QLC SSD)
hey guys,
Is this going to be compatible with the PS5?
I see what you did there 😂
If I just want a place to off load my GoPro video and raw photos would this be suitable for that? I wouldn't need to access them often once they have been moved over.
The transfer speed from GoPro / SD Card onto this drive would be limited by the SD Card read speed, so this drive is fine for that transfer.
A faster drive might be a more desirable intermediate resting place if you are doing lots of manually-intensive video editing and want good responsiveness for manual actions inside the app, this will also be true if you're making many backup copies as you go about video editing. If you are only doing basic video editing now and then with minimal manual work (few clicks and hit run type stuff) I doubt it's much of an issue, in that case it's mostly just the video processing and conversion jobs themselves which will be limited by your CPU, not the drive speed.
As a final resting place as a dedicated video storage drive, SMR drives are good enough.
If there's any chance you will use the drive more generally (including repurposing it at a later date) then I'd seriously consider just paying the premium for a CMR drive instead. These SMR drives are pretty terrible in many situations.
Thanks, i really just want cold storage to archive video and pictures to when I've finished working with them. I'll have them on my SSD when editing etc.
Cheers
Wasn't a similar 4TB one $36 at iTech a few days ago? ducks
The ironwolf is actually a better quality drive but it looks like it was a price error and the orders were canceled
Upvoted. They were all cancelled and apparently that's standard behaviour for iTech.
On my lame joke, all I can say is, "everybody laughed when I said I wanted to become a professional comedian but nobody's laughing now."
I’m new to all the NAS stuff. Would this be alright for NAS backups?
I have 9 of them running in RAID5 (LSI 2208 controller with 1GB cache) 24/7 for the past 6 or more years. Only recently swapped the oldest one. RAID rebuilt within 8 hours.
Performance is more than acceptable for a file server - see recent test results: https://imgur.com/6h5OHIL
What file system are you using?
NTFS
Ooh, Barracuda.
Just bought 2 and flipped out when I saw this! Then realised I'd got iron wolf drives. Ozbargain can be a rollercoaster of emotions lol
For those running unraid, SMR isnt so bad, especially if you've got a cache drive.
Currently preclearing, and started out at 180MB/s (My WD red pros started at 210MB/s), and its now at 50% and running at 163MB/s which is still pretty good. i think my WE reds slowed to 113MB/s at the very end (the read/write rates drop toward the middle of the platter as there is less data per rpm). The 5400rpm drive definitely runs cooler though, its been under a stress test for 6.5hrs and its 5C cooler than the reds that are idling.
This is just my experience, YMMV
Sorry I haven’t done much research on these drives, currently I have a few 1TB portable HDD’s connected to my Mac mini running as a Plex server, not the most ideal setup but I was thinking one of these drives with a HDD enclosure, speed is not an important factor
Will this be ok for Plex use?
I will be doing file transfer over wifi so again speed not an issue
looks like it's gone up to $189 and I can't get $5.99 metro delivery. Cheapest delivery option for me is $14.95
How are these for NAS drives? Hasn't been any 10TB+ WD Elements deals lately.