Seagate ARCHIVE 8TB HDD review - Introduction

Seagate 8TB ARCHIVE HDD
We're Going Mechanical Again ...

We review the Seagate ARCHIVE series HDD, the 8 Terabyte version. Though SSDs are the thing to purchase these days, if you need massive bulk volume storage then you'll need a HDD as pricing is the trivial thing here. Let's face it, HDDs are the titanic of the storage units closing in on thet iceberg. Right now they still serve as a viable solution in the storage arena, but only for one reason... price versus storage capacity. HDDs are still cheaper opposed to SSD / NAND based flash storage units. Time is changing fast though, this year we are going to see SSDs with prices at 13 cents per GB (three years ago that was 1 USD per GB), and as such I forsee that in the next 5 years the HDD will slowly become something obolete as in terms of performance and reliability you just cannot beat an SSD. That said, it is the year 2016 and mass-volume HDD storage units are still cheap, the bigger they are the more cheaper they get relatively per GB. Here at Guru3D.com I always recommend any PC user to have a fast SSD for their OS, important (much used) application and games. For the rest like documents, photos music and media files you want to add a nice high volume HDD.

Seagate has revision 2 of their ARCHIVE series HDDs available. They offer various volume sizes but since I need to setup a new office NAS my eyes fell on the 8 TB versions, that's right 8 Terabytes. OK, after formatting it's just above 7.5 TB available per HDD but still that's plenty, right?

So why did I opt for Seagate? Well, one reason only, price. For its usage this is a non-priority HDD storage solution housed inside a NAS, I'll purchase two to place them in RAID mirror mode for redundancy. Each HDD will costs me, get this... 225 EURO. Yep 225 EURO for 8 TB that's give or take €0.028 per GB man. Let's round that up to 3 euro cents per GB. And yeah it is exacxtly that what the NAND based SSDs still are fighting.

The Seagate Archive HDD v2 8 TB HDD can be found under SKU code ST8000AS0002. The product is 3.5" sized, is tied to a SATA-600 port and spins at an RPM of 5,900rpm. Read and writes sequential are rated at 150 MB/sec, which is plenty for a NAS setup or volume storage drive. Small files and IOPS number are going to SUCK though as this is a HDD, and it's mechanical. Yes the magnetic heads move back and forth creating lag, latency and slow response time and thus they are lacklustre for small IO numbers anno 2016. Seagate addresses the small IO writes with a DRAM cache chip though, but it's only 128 MB of IO buffer.

For a HDD the specs are decent enough by any standard. Power consumption wise this unit sits at 7.5 W while reading/writing. Have a peek first, after which we'll dive into the technology behind it and obviously we'll present you a nice phat performance overview.