• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Seagate SMR 8TB Performance

J

Josh Hazel

Limp Gawd
Joined
Aug 27, 2006
Messages
176
I was curious what others found in performance of there Seagate 8TB drives...
This was the best review I found here Seagate 8TB review

I would tend to have to agree with the review. It does surprisingly well writing in short bursts. My initial calculations were in the 100s of MB/sec. Obviously that decreases significantly after longer periods of data transfer.

Just thought I would share my real world transfer rates with everyone... I decided to backup 7TB from one drive to the next. I used a 2 brand new drives and only used quick format.

I am running both drives on the same ICR10r chipset. Both drives and ports are SATA3.

After 1 hour 7 minutes of transfer from one 8TB to another 8TB I had transferred 339,501,514,752 bytes. I am estimating that to be ~80.54 MB/sec transfer between the two if my math on the above is correct (I am sure someone will tell me if I suck at math).

After 2 hour 24 minutes I checked again 507,157,143,552 bytes estimating: 55.97948405 MB/sec

After 13 hours 0 minutes I checked again 2,270,946,021,376 bytes copied, estimating: 46.27655758 MB/sec

After 20 hours 20 minutes I checked again 3,389,091,655,680 bytes copied, estimating: 44.22673328 MB/sec

After 40 hours 12 minutes I checked again 6,501,294,723,072 bytes copied, estimating: 42.8421628 MB/sec

After 45 hours 13 minutes I checked again 7,204,584,013,824 bytes copied, estimating: 42.22484473 MB/sec


5 Hours remain before finishing the backup.
 
Last edited:
I thought you would get full speed for the first complete drive write but I guess not.
 
Wow, that performance sucks. The only thing that makes me want to do is avoid SMR drives completely, even for archiving.
 
Interesting to see that the review showed that SMR drives are for single-drive use only, and strongly recommended not to use them for RAID, with rebuild times being triple that of PMR drives.
 
pxc said:
Wow, that performance sucks. The only thing that makes me want to do is avoid SMR drives completely, even for archiving.
Click to expand...


Yeah I'm surprised we haven't seen more reviews since SMR isn't exactly "new" these days, but I guess HDD reviews are dying in wake of SSD's now.

That performance is really bad. Explains why it's only used as a semi-tape replacement for long-term storage and not a primary medium. SMR is really just biting time until HAMR is fully mature. It would probably still be useable even with future HDD technologies though so I doubt it'll ever go away now.

Fascinating approach to storage though.
 
I updated my original post... 4 hours later... seems to be a steady 42MB/sec

After 45 hours 13 minutes I checked again 7,204,584,013,824 bytes copied, estimating: 42.22484473 MB/sec

For the initial backup you are looking at a couple days minimum. You have to remember you are comparing a $300 drive to something like a $600 alternative.
 
I bought one of these drives and just installed it last night. I added it to my drivepool and I call it a day. Just a nice large drive for more storage...I have no issues with performance because I dont care. I never bought it for speed. Bought it for 249 bucks that gave me 8 TB of space. Simply amazing..:D
 
jordan12 said:
I bought one of these drives and just installed it last night. I added it to my drivepool and I call it a day. Just a nice large drive for more storage...I have no issues with performance because I dont care. I never bought it for speed. Bought it for 249 bucks that gave me 8 TB of space. Simply amazing..:D
Click to expand...

I missed out on the 249 pre-order deal... kinda bummed out cuz I bought 2, that would have saved me $100. Did you get it from B&H ?
 
The best combination here would be Enterprise-grade drives fronted with SSDs for active work.

Basically, in essence, high capacity SSDs need to be used as a non-volatile replacement for the onboard and slow DRAM in HDDs. An ideal setup might be a 10TB RAID1 with three disks (each disk 10TB), and then either one 1TB SSD or two 1TB SSDs in RAID0 (or blah, why not, RAID1 again).

Would be great for a photography and video rendering machine. :)
 
It seems fine if you are just incrementally backing up small amounts of data.

Say you run a nightly backup of something like 50GB at a time from that day's new data.

Especially if the read speed is fast for restoring from that backup.
 
I just bought one last night for $299 -- sucks I could have saved 50 bucks if I'd ordered when it first came out.


Speed isn't a huge issue for me - it will be housing all my Blu-Ray rips (currently my 4TB movie drive is full, and holding about 440 movies. With 8TB i have room to hit about 800 movies (~15GB a pop, 1080p)

Was tempted to save money and get more space by buying two 5TB externals... but I've heard terrible things about them.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top