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Seagate 8tb Archive Drives

Discussion in 'Creative Art' started by Cbcw76, May 4, 2016.

  1. Cbcw76

    Cbcw76 Member

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    We've pushed past our 100th Seagate 8tb Archive Drive and we're impressed with their storage capacity and their relatively low price ($220 on NewEgg, with occasional sales).

    THE BAD NEWS...

    But - be forewarned - writing to these is a SLOW SLOW process. Slower than any drive since 1990 MFM drives that were replaced by IDEs.

    We load large video-files onto these home-media server PCs, and can put 1200-1300 equivalents of a DVD-FileSet (4.3gb) and still have 30-40% capacity remaining.

    But this can be a 20-hour process. Yes. All day. All night. Deep into the next day. Writes start in the common SATA 6 range of 180-120mbs, then fall to 110, then 90, then 60 then 30 or 28.

    That will occur in the first 15-20 minutes, too. From that point on, SUH-LOOOOW will be the operative word.

    This, however, is the Initial Load Process. Do it once, and fine - it's all set.

    Reading those files (to copy to other fast drives) will be quick, however. I can copy from one of these Archive-8s to a 7200rpm drive at the common 110-120mbs.

    THE GOOD NEWS...

    If we use 4 servers to load onto one media-PC's 4 Archive-8 Drives, each COPY stream ends up at the same speed as any single drive. The COPY speeds are so slow that the CPU and SATA controllers can easily handle 4 copy streams as fast as 1!

    So, with four 'feeding' computers into 1 new media-server, we can load 4 Archive 8tbs as fast as 1 Archive.

    RAID?

    We have used RAID-5 on these drives and are not pleased. We used an LSI card and an Adaptec, then a cheapo RocketRaid, on 4- and 5-drive RAID5 setups. Installation proceeded normally, but daily operation was flakey across all three RAID cards on every set of Archive 8's. Seagate says "not recommended" and we agree. "These are not ready for prime-time RAIDs." I think the Write Time is sooooo slow that the RAID systems simply aren't understanding why the slow down! "It must be a bad drive. Or two or three. Let's stop working too."

    If I was going to use the drives on a many-uses Desktop Computer (with normal workloads), I'd also install a fast 7200rpm large-capacity (4tb? 5? 6?) drive as a primary Work File Storage drive and then move those files to the Archive-8's after those Work Drive projects were completed.

    Reading Speeds aren't the problem. And small (5gb) writes aren't a big problem. But once you get into the Writing 10+gb, the slow speeds will seem punishing.
     
  2. melthebell

    melthebell Well-Known Member

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    ah, youre a dirty spammer
     
  3. Jen7

    Jen7 Well-Known Member

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  4. melthebell

    melthebell Well-Known Member

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    she replied to my zombie film dvd list thread wanting to talk in private "more about it" and she also sent me a pm telling me i should email her to talk about collections of films etc
    looking at this post shes probably trying to harvest my details if i did
     

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