I may have missed it, but why would they only offer this drive in an enclosure? Is it to exert as much control over the operating environment as they can, to minimize failures? Or is this a sign of the decline of self-built desktops? I feel like there's a decent rise in RAID and NAS setups, though.

Anyway, sorry if this was discussed already here.

My wording in the post I believe your responding to is off a bit. The 8TB Archine drive is available in internal form factors too. (Specifically ST8000AS0002). Seagate uses the same model by adding an external USB 3 case to it as well, the one I linked to on Amazon.

Local to Seattle, I can only find physical retail stores that stock the USB 3 external variant, and not the internal SATA one. A Frys employee recommended buying it anyhow and cracking the external case, but I'm not willing to do that since I'd lose Seagate's warranty in the process.

Same here, I'm not aware of any computer retailer were I could sensibly walk in and buy any vaguely interesting drives at a sane price where I could have any confidence that the drives had been treated any better than ones sent to be by courier.

I guess things must be very different in the US/Canada. In the UK the options are:

- big chain retailer that cater for non-techies, retail packaging, high prices, no 8TB NAS drives and the likelihood that drives have been juggled by a teenage shop assistant in the stock room
- tiny one man local computer shop, also no 8TB NAS drives, gets his drives couriered to him just like me, basically exists to repair computersAndroid phones for non-techies

Gone are the days of having a mid sized PC builder/parts seller in a nearby town. And even then that was only available in a relatively few places in the UK. It was easy in London, Manchester, Liverpool etc or if you happened to live near someone like Watford Electronics.

Not so easy for example in Sheffield, where I lived in the 1990s. Despite being a England's 6th largest city it never really had a volume PC parts outlet. Lots of one/two man PC shops, but never really anything bigger than that.

Pretty much all of my drives over the last 20 years have come via courier/post. I think I'm right in saying I'd had two drive failures in that time, one failed after 10 years (?), one DOA. Sample size, one

With the better merchandise return laws in Britain (compared with here) I expect they actually package the drives nicely when shipping individually.

They do that here too now, sometimes..

An interesting theory, we certainly do have reasonably robust consumer laws.

I just happen to have a typical box that drives ship in. It is 8x6x4 inches, where all the space not taken up by the 3.5 inch drive is taken up by dense good quality foam. I have no idea how that compares to shipping boxes elsewhere.

If you order from Amazon you can of course end up with one of these robust boxes further packaged in an Amazon box with extra padding. Typically from dedicated computer retailers they just post the box the drive comes from the manufacturer in.

I suspect that I'll only ever buy another 3 hard disks in my life. I need to buy three at some point to upgrade the 2TB drives in my home Linux ZFS server (probably with 4TB drives).

But after that, I fully expect SSD prices to have come down enough (and my storage need increases to have continued to slowed) to mean that by the time I need to replace the 4TB drives I'll be able to do it with SSDs.

I only have 5 actual hard drives in use now, the three in my server, one in an old Mac Mini (which has a spare SSD waiting for it when I get round to it) and one in my gaming PC. All the drives I use for work daily are SSDs.

My two drives, from Amazon, each arrived in a 20*15*10 cm box, approximately. Drives were locked in pace by simple plastic supports that would surround the short side of the drives by possibly 2cm, and extend to fill the smallest sides of the box. Rest of the box was completely empty.
This happened over time with virtually every HDD I've ordered from Amazon (10-15 maybe, over the last 5 years).

Oh, the two boxes, then, where placed into a larger Amazon box with foam chips (not sure that's the right English word here) all around.

I haven't even checked for the last 15 years, possibly. As I read Mark's recommendation to buy off the shelf, I tried to think where I could go in Rome to do that, and to my amusement I would not know.
The largest retailers I can think never, never, carry latest technology on the shelf any more - it's just sad to even walk in, to me, and see overpriced stuff from last year on sale.
I have in mind few smaller computer stores in the city that used to carry better quality products. Occasionally I found better prices there than Amazon for DIMMs, I remember, but usually such shops would simply order for you from their wholesalers: you'd have to go, order, maybe pay a little in advance, wait a week or a month, go back, and pick up your item, only to be told that there was a "problem" of sorts and your item is not in yet - try next week. Very annoying.

I am now thinking, however, that there are few - well, maybe one - on line retailer I know of that specializes in case modding items, but does have also computer parts and components to assemble your PC. i've used them a lot in the past. It is possible they'd have the right mindset and package with more care.

We refer to them as peanuts, but close enough.

That sounds similar to how my drives have arrived from Amazon, except the cradle was on both ends of the drive.

You know, I thought you were crazy, but given how much more I'm relying on the cloud these days, I can certainly see using SSDs for everything in the future. The cost will have to decrease significantly, though.


Ah yes, I misunderstood. I found the drives on Amazon.


That's how all my drives have arrived...


...except for this part. I believe you're talking about "packing peanuts." I rarely receive a package with those anymore. They're falling out of favor due to their environmental impact. These days I almost exclusively see things packed with the large plastic bubbles.

I'm mostly happy to see the peanuts go because of their obnoxious tendency to stick to everything, especially the little tiny pieces...

Amazon seems to mostly be using crumpled packing paper here now, rather than foam peanuts or air bags.

So yes, I searched on line, and I see packaging peanuts (thanks guys) come of course in various sizes and shapes. Usually, these are the ones I've seen, in terms of size and shape:
http://weshipjackson.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/catpoofs.jpg
They're not too bad. Smaller ones are horrible and just as Matt says they stick to everything.

Cat is not one of mine, but they all would be VERY happy in a similar situation.

Now, back on topic, to be even more accurate: LAST TIME (for the 8TB drives) the two HDD boxes where put together into a large Amazon box with packaging peanuts. But, this does not always happens. In many cases, plastic bubbles are used instead of peanuts, here too. Occasionally, drives arrived in smaller individual boxes - meaning: the above mentioned individual HDD boxes would be placed in slightly larger Amazon boxes, for one drive only, also filled with something (plastic bubbles, peanuts, cardboard). Few times, such amazon boxes where actually huge in comparison, making it a very safe packaging but also an incredible waste of storage space!

Please notice I usually order my personal drives in couples. So, over time, I ordered several single drives for various office usage, or friends, or whatever, and several couples for me. I noticed that having two units in one order does not necessarily translates into one large amazon box containing both units. Sometimes it does, sometimes you'll get two separate boxes.

So, Amazon has been shipping to me using a quite wide range of packaging solutions.

So, this project was on hold for the last three weeks as I had my apt bathroom re-done. I just resumed it and decided to give the hole saw a try. It worked nicely, I have to say. Here are some pictures for you.

As you can see 90% of the edges are nice, 10% a bit too sharp. However, I fitted the rubber finishing I planned to use, and it looks decent.

Server HDD temp, after 1 hr running with the new panel fitted, raised from 30°C to 33°C . It seems stable now.

Thanks again everyone for the many suggestions!

Edit: Sorry pictures 01, 05, 09 are too big to show in the post. Just click on them if you're curious, of course.

Good job, looks like you got there in the end.

Also, decent idea putting the hole off-center like that: the view through it to the drives shows that it probably helps the cooling positioned like that!

Actually I was forced to put it off center: on the back side of the panel are metal "hooks" to secure the panel to the rest of the case, and I wanted to keep 0.5 cm far from them to insure they'd not be damaged by the hole saw. In retrospect, it was a relatively clean job, so I could have centered it a bit more - but not completely anyway.

After few hrs now, temp is 33/34 C . While this is very good, it is interesting how having the side panel fully removed makes 3/4 C degrees difference.

Also, weather is improving and I wonder how things will be as it gets warmer.

I am considering making a second similar hole (with a net or dust filter of some sort, this time) not far from this one. Not sure it would pay off, but it is actually a fairly easy thing to do and now I have all I need. Mmmh...

Mark,
Back to the drive itself, have you noticed any issues with lots of recordings simultaneously and the drive keeping up? Every now and then I have as many as 6 - 8 streams going at once. Total bit rate is probably of the order of 30-40Mbit/sec so not much in hard drive terms really but a bit of seeking might be required.

My understanding is that data is buffered or queued in a RAM and/or disk cache. I presume video recording has a high enough data rate that it's treated as a continuous write but also low enough that it can easily keep up?

One of these would replace 4 individual drives in my MythTV backend and add some 1TB of capacity as a bonus which would free up some NAS space.

Thanks

The only time I notice any kind of slowdown with these drives (both of them in the MythTV backend for videos/recordings) is when mass-copying video files (multi-GB each) to them over the GigE LAN. After the first few GB, things slow down due to the slow sustained write/rewrite cycles.

My BE has only two tuners now, and there's no problem there.

In the past, I did test limits of MythTV with a 6-tuner setup, and got the system to record 8 programs (some digital channels have more than one "sub-channel") at once, whilst watching an older HD recording. Glitch-free.

The kicker though.. I did all of that using a single USB2 drive for the recordings. So data rates weren't really an issue at the time.

The MythTV backend code is good about using fdatasync() to prevent the uncommitted writes from piling up prior to the next (every 5-sec by default) kernel-initiated flush.

Cheers

Thanks Mark.

Yes we have DVB-T here and I regularly use the multiple streams per multiplex ie multirec in MythTV. So I have 4 DVB-T tuners + 1 video capture HD PVR. Sounds like it would be little issue for recording then.

When you say slow down when copying, it's only a few GB before slowing down? One review I read mentioned the disk cache was believed to be 20GB. I do have GbE finally between my rooms so this might be important. How much do they slow down?

I haven't really kept track of how many GB I must throw at it at once before it begins to slow down. When it does slow down, the write throughput feels like around 40MB/sec rather than the normal 110MB/sec it gets from GigE.

"Small" copies for me are 4-5 shows, 1-3GB each. No issues with that scale of copying from LAN.

Larger ones are, say, 10-15 videos, each between one and 5GB or so. Somewhere in there things get bogged down.

Cheers

So to report my experiences:

Brand new drive with ext4 filesystem on it. Intention is to move everything from 4 other drives and this replaces them all (maybe keep the biggest one which is 3TB)

I managed to get to about 170GB copied with mc running about 80-90 MB/s before it really fell away. I stopped it for other reasons and went with rsync to move on the fly so I can stop and restart it. Rsync is running around 20 MB/s now and seems to have levelled out there.

Edit: It appears Rsync is particularly slow and looks CPU bound doing disk to disk copies. Back to using mc I'm seeing 40-50 MB/s speeds.

I had already added it to MythTV's recording pool which it used straight away since it was empty of course. This occurred whilst copying. I did see a lot of "took a long time" (to write) messages but it doesn't appear to have lost any recorded data when writing.

Mmmm... I still recommend AGAINST ext4 for collections of multi-GB files. XFS has always outperformed it for me here, particularly on file creates and deletes.

I haven't compared the two again recently though (past 3 years), so perhaps ext4 is adequate now.

Cheers

Ah yeah I changed my mind and went for XFS before I'd moved too much over.

That said I have 3 XFS partitions and one 3TB ext4 in the same machine (with the ext4 doing most of the work) and it's been fine for at least a year or two.

The slow delete in MythTV works well enough to deal with the large file deletes.

I have had two of these drives in the MythTV box for the past while. One of them had been acting up of late, and judging from the system logs it has actually been acting up since last November.

Nothing of note in the S.M.A.R.T. data -- something I have noticed that Seagate was doing with the 4TB drives too: don't log anything that might cause a customer to return a drive under warranty. Or something like that.

I checked the S.M.A.R.T. data on this drive as recently as last week -- 100% "error free", indicating to me that perhaps it was a cabling issue or something instead.

Ha. Dead drive today. Totally. Spins up, but won't talk to any system I connect it to. This was the newer of the two drives.

Edit: I will pick up a WD80EFZX (Western Digital Red 8TB drive) to replace it with on Saturday, then RMA the dead one.

Kinda defeats the purpose of SMART if that's how they're playing it.

SMART never really became what it should have and probably largely for the reason you mentioned.

Is this a widespread thing among manufacturers, or just Seagate?

I have noticed that WD drives seem to record "media errors" as "pending bad sectors" instead, which then disappear from the S.M.A.R.T. data as soon as they are overwritten (correcting the error).

Not sure that that is entirely truthfully behaviour either.

The 6TB restore-from-backup completed without a hitch (about 14 hours). New drive seems plenty quick enough and not overly noisy. Time will tell.

Now to figure out the RMA thing.

Mark, any particular reason for this choice? Just interested in your opinion.

Incidentally, just to offer an update since I started this thread: both my one remaining 8TB Seagate and my 6TB WD RED hdd are working happily since I improved air flow and cooling. They went through hot summer days without ever going >40°C .