Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

This review is for an 8TB Seagate Archive drive model# ST8000AS0002. I have recently purchased a pair of these drives to replace a number of smaller backup drives from different manufacturers. There aren't any reviews for these drives that I could find, so hopefully this will help someone. Tests -------- I usually run a few tests on all of my HDDs before they're put into service. The first set of tests includes downloading Seagate's Seatools software and runnig Short Generic and Long Generic tests. These are followed by Drive Selftest. Short Generic and Drive Selftest completed successfully in just a few minutes. Long Generic test also passed but took a few hours to complete. I then ran a full format (not quick format) on both drives, which completed overnight. With both drives freshly formatted and completely empty, Crystal Disk Mark reports some pretty good numbers. Sequential reads and writes are both very close to 200MB/s, which is a bit higher than the peak transfer rate of 190MB/s that is listed in Seagate's datasheets. Next, I ran a Perl script that filled both drives with ~8TB of data leaving just 30GB free and then re-ran Crystal Disk Mark. Sequential reads and writes dropped considerably and were both in the 80-90MB/s range. So, on average, you are getting close to the advertised average transfer speed of 150MB/s. This is adequate for my backup needs since they are done over a wireless AC network and I can only see transfer rates of 50-70MB/s anyway. Crystal Disk Info ------------------------ Crystal Disk Info did not reveal any immediate issues with the drives. So far, I do not see any excessive head parking issues. I did not see any reallocation events or reallocated sectors after filling up the drive with data completely. One interesting bit of info is that these drives don't seem to support APM (advanced power management), so perhaps they will not be able to spin down to save power. Edit: Evidently, this model supports Seagate's PowerChoice technology, so these drives should be able to spin down with no activity http://www.seagate.com/files/docs/pdf/en-GB/whitepaper/tp608-powerchoice-tech-provides-gb.pdf Other Performance Observations ----------------------------------------------- These 8TB drives use a relatively new technology called Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR). It allows for much higher data density, but introduces some challenges when data must be written to a track that is next to another track that already has data. The drive has to potentially rewrite data on the track adjacent to the one it's writing to in order to avoid losing that previously written data. Some people speculated that this may impact performance somewhat. The question is - how much? To try and simulate this scenario, I started a data transfer with a bunch of files that added up to ~200GB. I then started another transfer of roughly equal size onto the same drive. Initially, the speed dropped by 55-60% on the original transfer, which was expected, and both transfers stabilized at around the same speed. After some time, however, I started seeing speed drops to the 1-3MB/s range which lasted a few seconds. The speed would then continue to fluctuate between 3MB/s and 40MB/s or so. Pausing one of the transfers helped. Transfer speed recovered back to the expected 80-100MB/s range. I still saw slowdowns back to the 3MB/s range even with one transfer but they didn't last as long and they were not as frequent. Temperatures and Noise ----------------------------------- I have not observed any unusual noises so far. Head parking noise is audible but does not seem to be excessive. Under load, one of the drives reached 35C and the other was at 32C. After idling for a few hours, temperatures have gone down to 34C and 30C respectively. One of the drives is a lot closer to an internal fan, so that explains the difference in temperature. Final Thoughts --------------------- If you have the need to store a lot of data that changes fairly infrequently then these drives should be a good fit. They also have a reasonably good, midrange warranty of 3 years. At ~$31.50 per TB, which is basically their MSRP, they are a pretty good deal. I would probably not recommend using them in RAID though. With such drastic drops in transfer speed, the RAID card/software may "think" that something went wrong and drop the drive from the array. And if something goes wrong with one of your other drives during a rebuild, which is guaranteed to last many hours with drives of this size, then you run the risk of losing the whole array. Note also that these drives have only two mounting screw holes on each side instead of the typical three that you see with other 3.5" drives.