Seagate Backup Plus 8TB Desktop External Hard Drive - $169.99

nice find, almost safer bets too :D

I presume these drives have the USB controller built in vs an adapter in the case.
 
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Many makers now are shipping out external drives with the USB 3 controller built into the drive, instead of the SATA connector to stop people from buying these drives and using them elsewhere, that is why i mentioned it, This is why they also sell these drives cheaper than bare drives and have great sales on them.
 
MrGuvernment said:
Many makers now are shipping out external drives with the USB 3 controller built into the drive, instead of the SATA connector to stop people from buying these drives and using them elsewhere, that is why i mentioned it, This is why they also sell these drives cheaper than bare drives and have great sales on them.
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That is the dumbest idea. If ppl want to buy externals and tear the drives out that's better for the makers as it breaks the warranty saving them money. I don't see the problem and I've yet to see any example of this. Is there an example of this out there?
 
thesmokingman said:
That is the dumbest idea. If ppl want to buy externals and tear the drives out that's better for the makers as it breaks the warranty saving them money. I don't see the problem and I've yet to see any example of this. Is there an example of this out there?
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There was some posts about it a while back here on [H] as people would buy the cheaper external drives and then gut them and people were finding the USB controller built in vs a SATA connector. Would have to look for it.

Doesnt save them money when people are buying a cheaper drive and using it for another purpose than the company planned, when the user "should" be buying a drive that costs a lot more, a 8TB 5900RPM goes for $329.99 on newegg right now.

I am sure now they do more firmware tweaks so the drives may not perform so great in say a NAS, but not long ago the drives in external enclosures were almost identical to the separate internal drives so people got smarts and bought the externals for cheaper.
 
thesmokingman said:
That is the dumbest idea. If ppl want to buy externals and tear the drives out that's better for the makers as it breaks the warranty saving them money. I don't see the problem and I've yet to see any example of this. Is there an example of this out there?
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Western Digital is notorious for this.

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Don't know of any Seagate drives offhand that do this.
 
thesmokingman said:
That's not a full size drive and 2.5's are a different matter.
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Point remains is that there is precedence for this and buying cheap externals is not something that guarantees that you will get a usable internal drive.
 
rat said:
Point remains is that there is precedence for this and buying cheap externals is not something that guarantees that you will get a usable internal drive.
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As I wrote, 2.5 is a whole other matter. That other guy made a post as if it was an alarming issue with 3.5 drives, and its not.
 
thesmokingman said:
That is the dumbest idea. If ppl want to buy externals and tear the drives out that's better for the makers as it breaks the warranty saving them money. I don't see the problem and I've yet to see any example of this. Is there an example of this out there?
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Its been this way for a long time, preventing people from "shucking" externals and taking them out of enclosures to put into NAS boxes at a fraction of the price. Simply another way for them to separate/diversify markets, the market for external drives won't spend a lot and tend to be non-tech savvy users vs. people who buy them much cheaper per GB with the intent to build storage arrays or throw them into NAS units.
 
thesmokingman said:
That's not a full size drive and 2.5's are a different matter. I've never had the inclination to rip out a 2.5 and throw it in my raid/nas etc, ya know what I mean?
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You can get 2.5" 5TB drives now.

But to save face, you are right, 3.5" drives still require 12V, so there will not be a USB port natively.
 
What I have seen done though, is make it so that you have to destroy the enclosure in order to remove the 3.5" drive.
 
Just received mine a few hours ago, it was previously opened and the unit is all scratched up. I haven't purchased anything from best buy in over 5 years and it's time for a bit more now.
 
I've ripped a WD drive out of the enclosure before and got them to honor the warranty without lying. I'm sure it could work with Seagate.
 
thesmokingman said:
For 156 bucks, SMR is perfect as a pure backup drive, which is what this drive is meant for, ie. not tearing it out and sticking into an array/nas/etc.
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Even tearing it out for an array is fine, as long as its not being constantly read and written to. My array is idle most of the time because I'm just serving myself, not a big community.

For the record, I got mine and its working fine and is definitely new in box (the Best Buy one).
 
thesmokingman said:
For 156 bucks, SMR is perfect as a pure backup drive, which is what this drive is meant for, ie. not tearing it out and sticking into an array/nas/etc.
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No disagreement there. One just has to be prepared for the weird behavior that comes along with SMR. I'm not a Seagate basher, btw - I had great success with about 50 x 3TB and 4TB's for years - even while "Lol Seagate sux" was the popular sentiment among brain surgeons that believe Backblaze is the gold standard of scientific reliability data.

But before buying a bunch of SMR drives, I recommend buying one first and testing it in one's own typical usage scenario to make sure it's going to be a fit.

In my own testing on a brand new 5TB SMR Seagate (admittedly I haven't tested the 8TB and maybe their SMR algorithm has improved), I first copied about 100GB of Bluray files from a fast 200MB/s source disk. Within a minute, the copy seemed to "freeze" for 20-30sec at 0.0MB/s while the HDD led was solid, and the drive was doing its SMR thing. I let the copy finish, took forever, and it averaged out to 15.6MB/s for the copy. At first I thought there was something wrong with the drive - as the PC appeared "frozen" - but all four drives that I'd purchased exhibited this behavior. This was at a time that SMR wasn't widely known to be on the 5TB's and Seagate didn't make it known in their marketing materials.
 
DPI said:
No disagreement there. One just has to be prepared for the weird behavior that comes along with SMR. I'm not a Seagate basher, btw - I had great success with about 50 x 3TB and 4TB's for years - even while "Lol Seagate sux" was the popular sentiment among brain surgeons that believe Backblaze is the gold standard of scientific reliability data.

But before buying a bunch of SMR drives, I recommend buying one first and testing it in one's own typical usage scenario to make sure it's going to be a fit.

In my own testing on a brand new 5TB SMR Seagate (admittedly I haven't tested the 8TB and maybe their SMR algorithm has improved), I first copied about 100GB of Bluray files from a fast 200MB/s source disk. Within a minute, the copy seemed to "freeze" for 20-30sec at 0.0MB/s while the HDD led was solid, and the drive was doing its SMR thing. I let the copy finish, took forever, and it averaged out to 15.6MB/s for the copy. At first I thought there was something wrong with the drive - as the PC appeared "frozen" - but all four drives that I'd purchased exhibited this behavior. This was at a time that SMR wasn't widely known to be on the 5TB's and Seagate didn't make it known in their marketing materials.
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Can somebody explain moer about SMR and what it does?
 
reapergato said:
Can somebody explain moer about SMR and what it does?
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It's an area of the drive that is much larger than the typical area of a traditional drive. Allows it to be layered giving a (cheap) way to increase density. The only problem is if data exists in the area it has to rewrite the whole thing making speeds terrible.
 
reapergato said:
Can somebody explain moer about SMR and what it does?
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Shingled Magnetic Recording.

Think roof shingles where, for each row, the shingle overlaps the row ahead slightly and is overlapped by the row before slightly... so when something is written to a cluster, or shingle, it has to overlap existing data. So when that happens, the overlap areas need to be rewritten, too, for all the new data added to the tracks. Density at the complete cost of performance. Personally, I'd rather run two 4TB drives in raid zero rather than deal with the monkey business that is SMR.
 
when did they start the SMR stuff? is it with just the 8tb or the lesser capacity ones too?
 
Very nice setup, I may do something similar if I can get two to run a raid 0 on for cheap.
 
Trimlock said:
Few years now, I bought a cheap 5tb thinking it was just a stripped down drive. Returned it thinking it was bad.
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It does appear that drives larger than 4TB are most likely to be slower shingle based drives until proven otherwise. I had planned to do three 4TB drives in a Raid 0 external as a weekly rsync backup for my 12TB Raid 6 pool because of the speed issues with larger capacity drives.
 
rat said:
It does appear that drives larger than 4TB are most likely to be slower shingle based drives until proven otherwise. I had planned to do three 4TB drives in a Raid 0 external as a weekly rsync backup for my 12TB Raid 6 pool because of the speed issues with larger capacity drives.
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No, it depends on the class of drive. There are plenty of high end PMR drives. In the pic above, that grey drive is a 10TB Ironwolf, most definitely NOT SMR.
 
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