Review: Seagate ARCHIVE 8TB HDD

#5221333 Posted on: 01/21/2016 03:15 AM

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I'm using one of these as a NAS drive hooked up to my router and I'm curious to see how well it holds up. I just purchased it at the beginning of the month and it's in a USB 3.0 enclosure (Protronix E35-B USB 3.0) at floor level. I will post in a years time and tell you if it's still running, and yes it will be on 24/7.

#5221362 Posted on: 01/21/2016 06:39 AM

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When reading the reviews on Tomsitpro and Storagereview they refer to Seagate saying: "Seagate does not recommended utilizing these drives in RAID or NAS environments".

I'm curious as i'm thinking of buying these for a NAS.

#5221574 Posted on: 01/21/2016 05:53 PM

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At least you can RMA,in my case I would like to send this,but right now,I need to find way how to recover it,I will be doing ddrescue on this HDD,I need to recover all files or big portion of the files which means around 2.1TB I need to recover

I spoke with Seagate regarding the recovery and they are been silent for several weeks,which means I'm alone with that

I bought this HDD as new,but previously I've bought used,he said its only used in NAS for several months,I got that HDD,when I saw how much data he written there(12.2PB) I send back that HDD to seller and he refunded me

Regarding yours hope so they will sort you out,but agree their RMA or customer service is just poor

Thanks,Jura

Well the HDD appeared at my door a hour ago, even though the UPS site says still in transit between depots... anyhow, it seems Seagate has sent me a different 5tb HDD, this one is called the Backup plus desktop drive, rather than the Expansion desktop drive which i sent them, still 5tb though, and it seem to be working, we shall see once i backup my 2tb of steam games, see how it fair with that little bit of work. lol

(Well blow me, on the bottom of the HDD, etched into the plastic base is the word recertified, did they just send me a second hand HDD to repleace my 3 month old faulty one?)

#5420482 Posted on: 04/14/2017 01:16 PM

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Review review

So... why do I want to compare an ARCHIVE HDD's performance to that of a slew of SSDs? How is that supposed to be useful? If I'm looking for a review of an HDD, I want to know how it holds up against its competition... not 20+ things that it absolutely can't compare to?!!?!

#5420493 Posted on: 04/14/2017 02:05 PM

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A better review would be between the different drives on offer from the same manufacturer. For instance, the ST8000AS0002 (Archive series) against the ST8000VX0022 (Surveillance series). Why Archive vs Surveillance? Because both are designed for 24/7 use, both have 3 years warranty, however on paper the Surveillance drivers are better. They have a greater MTBF, are designed for constant writing and reading, use LESS power, and are faster, however cost a little bit more. I think the extra cost is worth it. Also the MTBF of the surveillance series is 1 million hours, compared to 800,000 hours for the Archive series.

Archive series spec sheet:
http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/hdd-fam/seagate-archive-hdd/en-us/docs/archive-hdd-ds1834-5c-1508us.pdf

Surveillance series spec sheet:
http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/skyhawk/files/skyhawk-ds-1902-3-1608us.pdf

The drives that most people are probably familiar with, the standard Seagate Barracuda range. I'm pretty sure they use to offer larger drives in this series, now it seems to top out at 4 GB. This isn't a bad thing when you see the specs, these are pretty much budget drives.
http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-content/barracuda-fam/barracuda-new/files/barracuda-ds-1900-5-1702us.pdf

Note power on is 2400 hours/year, which is 8 hours a day, 6 days a week (NOT 24/7 use). That's 100 days constant use. Now, look at the warranty period, 2 years. It means the drives are effectively warranted only for 200 days use! Their workload rate is 55 GB/year compared to 180 GB/yr for the archive and Surveillance series, the 3 TB and 2 TB drives use more power (much more than even the 4 GB), and despite spinning faster are not really any faster at least according to the specs.

Basically, don't compare the standard desktop drives like the ST4000DM004 to the archive or surveillance series, they really don't compare. Comparison between the surveillance and archive series would be good though, the surveillance series comes in sizes from 1 TB to 10 TB.

The RPM of 5900 isn't so much an issue these days, I haven't noticed a scrap of difference in performance between my surveillance drives compared to the standard desktop drives I had. I changed over because I very much like the idea of better longevity drives. I replaced 2 very recently just in time! They worked perfectly, but on the second cleaning pass they both start playing up.

The way I see it, the archive series you can have running 24/7, but is designed for only light read/write cycles, hence archive! The surveillance series are designed for 24/7 use, and constant write/read as required with surveillance. These cost a little more than the archive drives, but would probably be better for heavier use than just storing pictures and video files that get light use.