Does anyone uses these new 8TB Seagate drives?

Here on Amazon:

http://www.amazon.it/dp/B00QGFEQXU/ref=w...=I3H5U5YJTG825Q

I am considering to expand my home server storage, and I've been looking at these for quite some time now.... I'd hate if they were unreliable, though, of course...

Thank you!

I have had one in service here, in the main MythTV box, since last winter. Thus far, 100% reliable. Which is more than I can say for some of the Seagate 4TB drives it replaced.

Thinking hard now about getting a second one, seeing as they're still priced at CDN$300 here this week, despite our currency's sharp decline over the past year.

Cheers

Good! Thank you Mark.

I only buy in couples (mirroring in my home server), so that's good to hear. I am hoping in some Amazon Black Friday deal.

I have 4 in a rack mounted Synology Server.

One came DOA and was quickly swapped out.

No problems with them so far, but it's far too early to tell. They seem fast enough for my use, the server isn't used for direct access just a cold archive.

Cheers

Cris

Thank you!

And Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

I did pick up a second one this past week, for CAD$280. It's in the mythtv box now, where it will replace two 4TB drives once the data copy finishes.

-ml

.... and one of the two forming my mirror failed.
Not a lucky month for my home IT systems.

It's on its way back to Amazon.

BTW: I bought them in January. Less than a month in operation. Oh well...

Do you guys know what the V2 of that same model actually is? What type of updates were made?

http://www.amazon.it/Seagate-S--Archive-...mp;keywords=8tb

Different sticker on the drive, exact same part numbers, same mass, same feature set, same internal-RAM size..

Probably identical, but with latest firmware (fewer, different bugs presumably).

I replaced the broken unit with a WD 6TB since Amazon did not have a 8TB available AND I do not want to give up the benefit of having Amazon replacing failed units with no question asked, and quickly.

I'll think where to go from there. I may get a second WD 6TB and use this 8TB for something else, or just accept that 2TB are "wasted" in my mirror, until next upgrade. I mean, I always have something to do with HDDs...

I never purchase mechanical drives through parcel-delivery. Just too much banging around in transit.

Cheers

How do you purchase them?

Anything short of driving to the factory yourself would involve the drives being sent in a parcel somewhere in their lifetime.

With heads parked, shouldn't the drives be fine for being shipped? I'd think that temperature variation during transit would be more of an issue than being banged around.

By the way, here is Backblaze's latest reliability report. Seagate is looking better than they used to.

https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-q4-2015/

My next drive purchases look like they will be HGST drives.

Over the counter, from either of two large computer retailers in town. They receive them in larger boxes of 50/100 drives, packed at the drive manufacturing factories. The boxes being larger, they're much harder for the UPS grunt to throw around from truck to truck, and the heavier boxes (heavier packing, heavier payload) have a lot more vibration resistance.

Cheers

In principle I may agree, Mark. But, I've been purchasing HDD on-line for the last 10 years, no exception, and I never had any issue. And, buying anything over the counter here means spending 15% more at least...

My concern is that Mark knows a lot more about hard drives than I do. Maybe he's got a good point.

For instance, I bought two WD reds from Amazon for my NAS, I configured them in a RAID pair, and they both eventually failed within a couple weeks of each other. Luckily I was able to use the RAID features to rebuild the first replacement before the second one failed.

I got the replacements the same way, so now I'm wondering if the reason for the failures was that the drives were shipped individually like Mark said. Maybe shipping them that way shortens their life span? Mark is making me wonder about that.

I would assume that either they get damaged and fail soon, or they don't? Mark, would you agree with this?

If so, this would explain your hdd failures, and mine here. But it would also explain why my other HDD are now in my backup nas after being for years in the server happily (24H in both locations) - so I would guess they were not damaged?

A "bathtub curve", they call it. Lots of infant deaths, and a bunch at very old age, but pretty stable in between.

I just think hard about how delicate the mechanical stuff is inside one of those, particularly when there are 8 platters stuffed inside an 8TB drive. Very very tight tolerances. The parking mechanisms seem to rely mainly on friction to hold the heads in place -- there's no mechanical interlock there.

Then I think about the various parcel delivery experiences I've had and witnessed.. especially the UPS guys that Amazon is so fond of over here.

My own (mechanical) hard drive failures ceased when I stopped receiving drives from remote suppliers. Now I have a glut of drives, as I replace long-lived 3TB/4TB models with new 8TB units. A Good Problem to have, I suppose!

Recently, I suspected one of the Seagate 8TB units was dying, but managed to trace the fault to a cracked SATA connector on the little red cable instead.

Yes, I thought so. Now, I've never deepened the analysis on HDD failure rate that much, but I'd assume the first part of the curve (high failure rate) is contributed ALSO by poor shipping and transportation.

And then there's this:

Google doesn't care if the next generation of hard drives is less reliable

Interesting point. If portable devices are all going to Flash, and the only systems to use Winchester drives are redundant arrays and cloud services, then it does make sense to plow forward with storage and speed, damn the reliability. That's really all that those Backblaze reports were ever saying. It's really interesting.

Local SOHO NAS units are still going to need reliability though, so that market segment will still exist for a while.

Interesting times.

As the mirror rebuilds, so HDDs at full throttle, the new WD RED is 10°C cooler than the 8TB Seagate.
That seems good, per se, so I guess it is true these new "NAS" hdds are also cooler on average. Not that it means they are necessarily more reliable, of course. We'll see.

Yes, really interesting point, there, Tony. I do hope we can soon move to SSDs in SOHO servers/nas as well, actually.

Most likely explanation: the smaller capacity WD drive has fewer platters than the 8TB Seagate.

Heat in drives is mostly a function of the platter count and RPM.

...OK. While rpm seems obvious, I am curious as to why the # of platters from the physics standpoint. I'd guess it is friction added by the extra platters, but I'm surprised by the impact this has!

Also, temp delta decreased to 5 degrees as the mirror rebuilt progressed, and stayed at 5 for hours yesterday until I went to sleep. I just woke up and NOW it is only 1 degree (72% completion).

HDD are in two adjacent trays, 8TV top, 6TB bottom. They are at 54 and 55 degrees respectively (Celsius).

Incidentally, I am thinking to add a fan right on the side of the trays.

87% complete.
WD is 52°C
Seagate is 58°C

58°C is quite high, in general, in my personal experience. What do you guys think?
Also, when it was working alone, with no other HDD near by, it used to run at 48°C circa.

I wonder if it is possible that these 8TB are not good in keeping cool when next to other HDDs... If so, I am afraid this one may fail soon as well .

As soon as the rebuild completes, I'll install an extra fan.

In general, how cool do your drives run?
Mine have always been around 45~50 °C in normal operation (which is pretty low in my home server, of course). So, I am not too worried about the 52°C (125°F) of the WD during a mirror rebuild.
I am a bit more worried of the Seagate 58°C (136°F)...

I try and avoid anything over 49C with my mechanical drives. My Seagates and WDs in the Mythbox and backup array rarely get over about 45C. Normally they are between 34C and 40C.

During a RAID build/rebuild (or an initial mass data copy of any kind), the drive electronics are much busier than in steady state operation, so the drives tend to heat up a lot more.

In the case of the Seagate with shingled magnetic recording (SMR), it will be even busier (and thus generate more heat) than other drives because of the need to rewrite adjacent tracks while writing others.

Once you get to steady state operation, I would expect things to cool down considerably.

EDIT: Meanwhile, if you have a room fan of some kind, direct it at the air intakes NOW, just to keep things happier.

Cheers

Mark, thank you.

My home server is in a Cooler Master HAF XB. I removed the side panel, and that alone caused this temp drop:

WD 49°C
Seagate 54°C

This is good, since I just found out I do not possess any home fan!

I do have possibly 10 PC fans in my PC parts boxes, so I'll see if I can do anything with those.

I am now planning to improve cooling of the hot-swap HDD area of the case. Sadly, the HAF XB has no hole in the bottom part of the side panel, where the hot-swap hdd tray is located. Which is a really silly flaw in what I consider a beautifully designed case otherwise:

http://www.cmstore.eu/parts-replacements/case/haf/haf-xb/haf-xb-side-panels/

So, I may have to use a Dremel there. Even without a hole, though, there seems to be enough space between the hdd tray and the side panel to allow some forced air circulation. I'll try that or keep the case open on one side while I make the hole myself.

I have the adapter to connect a PC fan power plug to a molex connector plug. That is, I have a fan that can be powered via a molex connector.

There's currently no molex connector available in my server, but I have a modular PSU and I could attach one to the PSU easily.

Would it be crazy to do is while the server is up and running? Would the PSU fail somehow?

Rebuild completed successfully.
Temps are now stable:

WD 44 C
Seagate 45 C

Case Side panel is removed, so there's a lot of air flow, but no fan.

I am now installing a temporary additional fan, waiting for the proper, silent Noctua to be delivered and put in place permanently.

Temporary fan installed.
Temperature now, in normal operation, is
WD 32 C
Se 33 C

Much, much better.

Case is still open, though. So, once I put in place the proper fan (which will be both more powerful and silent) and I close the case, I hope I can keep around 35. That'd be great.

Nice looking case. And yeah, pity they didn't include enough cooling holes.

Another buddy of mine has a nifty little "NAS" case. Not as pretty as that one, but "purpose built" nonetheless. Same kind of flaw -- the drives run hot in there. And the relatively small diameter fans are loud.

My MythTV box was designed with near-silent cooling in mind, and on the whole they did a great job with it. The primary drive bays are particularly well done. But the secondary drive bays again lacked sufficient air intake holes. So I nibbled out a large circle under the drives, and added a 120mm slim fan at very low RPM under them. Nice and cool now.

Cheers

I have tried Noctua fans for my 100% silent server (under my home desk) and MythTV box (media room), but was surprised that they weren't completely silent.

My aim for fans is simple: large diameter, low RPM, no perceptible noise in a pretty quiet room.

For the slim fan under the drives in the MythTV box, I used a Kaze-Jyuni SCYTHE (120mmx12mm) Sy1212SL12H-P. Nominally 1200rpm, but I slowed it down further with a fat resistor.

I cannot find the spare 700rpm fan I bought for the server (dead silent) to see what brand it is (cannot find loads of stuff.. moving house is very stressful on memory..). EDIT: Found it: another SCYTHE fan: SP1225FDB12L. Didn't need to add any resistors to it either.

Cheers

I am impressed at how temperature, in steady normal operation, keeps decreasing.
30 C and 32 C degrees respectively.
I'll add this piece of info: the Seagate, being on top, should in fact be a bit warmer as it takes heat coming fromt he WD HDD below it (hot air will move up, naturally) So, the Seagate does not see that much hotter than the WD after all, it would appear.

Mark, indeed, this is possibly the best case I had for a home server. The top half is cooled really, really well, so, MoBo CPU, Video card are all at ideal temperature. The bottom half only has room for 2 80cm fans in the back left side of it. But, hot-swap HDD location, front right, right in front of the PSU, is completely lacking any ventilation. Which is quite silly as
1. there is plenty of room for a side fan
2. even just ventilation holes at the bottom of the side panel would heve helped. Such hole wuld have been right where the HDD are.

Hard to complain about those temperatures. That should be healthy enough for the drives!

I can't hear my Noctuas at all in the server, I have to say. I can now hear this temporary Cooler Master I put in place, but not that much.

I also do the same: big and slow fans. Noctua usually includes adapters to slow down fans, as you did, down to 900-800-700 rpm, depending on the models. I do slow them down all the times, without temp issues. I've been quite happy with Noctua so far.

On my main PC, though, which was built to be a gaming PC (in the hope I had time to play games) I installed more Noctua fans than actually needed (purpose: overclock, just for fun, and getting rid of the noisy video card fans, completely). The PC is not "silent", but, to be accurate, I should say that I do no hear the fans themselves, but rather the massive airflow in and out of the case. I would still consider it "quiet" compared to any other similarly built PC I owned in the past.

29 C / 30 C respectively now.
Wow. I certainly did not expect THIS big a difference.
What's the lowest recommended temp for HDD?! (JK)

Mark, I went and looked, and there IS in fact room underneath the hot-swap HDDs, in the HAF XB. BUT, no holes on the bottom ot the case THERE (Elsewhere, yes!!). THAT would've been nice, but not, they really did not want to cool those drives down...

Also, I am thinking that a side fan possibly is better as it pushes the airflow right between the two drives.

Don't know for sure, but I can tell you from experience that if you leave an empeg in your car overnight when the temperature is below zero F (about minus 20 C) sometimes you have to put the empeg in front of the heater outlet for 10 or 15 minutes before the hard drive will spin up. Just keep your server room warmer than minus 10 C and you should be all right.

tanstaafl.

Hah. I'll do my best, Doug!

After few hours up and running (we watched a couple of episodes of a TV series I keep in the server, so there was some minimal reading from the drives; then I run a manual backup session, as a test, so lots of reading from the drives and writing to the USB3 attached drobo, then did some work at the keyboard), HDD are at 30 / 31 respectively. Pretty good.

We both know that the most important thing is to have some gentle airflow. The direction and volume are less important.

The secondary bay in the MythTV box here is like that.. the two drives lay horizontally above the slim fan. Not optimal for cooling, but good enough, and quieter perhaps than a side fan in this instance.

There's a 4TB Seagate in that bay by itself now, and it is idling at 33C (current ambient is around 22C). I'm quite happy with that!

Cheers

IIRC, the big SAN arrays I supported considered anything above 45C as a warning and 50C as critical worthy of shutting down the enclosure. Was an interesting challenge to see with the 15K and many platter drives of the time prior to the rise of SSDs for the performance tier.

The backups for this board wind up on an ARM powered ReadyNAS, 2 bay. It's got the fan running at ~800rpm currently and it's keeping the Seagate drives at this temperature:

ST2000DL003-9VT166 1863 GB (34 °C / 93 °F, Write-cache On). Status: OK


My larger NAS has 4 Samsung drives, and a larger fan running around ~1800rpm.

SAMSUNG HD203WI 1863 GB , 29 C / 84 F, at the low end, and 32 C / 89 F for one of the ones in the middle.

Not sure what will replace them, as I tend to go one tier below the largest drives. Looks like by next year that might be in the 8-10TB range.

Yes, I too think a fan at the bottom would probably be enough. Certainly for the bottom HDD, most likely for the one on top as well. But, since none of the two locations are designed to have a fan in there, and putting it on one side is easier in my case, I think I'll go with that. Creating a hole in the side panel is going to be much easier because I can actually remove the side panel. Doing anything at the bottom panel of the case means basically taking the server apart.

Actually, I've been carefully looking at the case, and I am hoping I can do without the side hole. There could be room enough to create air circulation. I'll only find out in few days when I get the correct size fan.

(Still 29 C / 30 C - That seems to be the normal temperature now for the drives. Nice nice nice!)

Thank you guys. So I've been running my drives at too high a temperature. I wonder if that is what killed the 8TB. Certainly it did not help. And most likely it had something wrong, as the other 8TB is still working and being on top it was running ever hotter.

I used to work for a big SAN mfg that as part of assembly and test would run the systems at a room temp of ~105f/40c, and then drop the temp to something cold (don't recall the temp). But the temp extremes and the rate of temp change would kill off the weak components. Those that survived then went through vibration testing... Fascinating stuff.

I know I've now bored you with this, but still, constantly, 29/30 C degrees throughout days of standard operation. Temp graph for the last 3 days is a flat line, regardless what the disks were doing. By zooming in I can see that rarely temp increased to 30/31, but 99% of the time it stays at 29/30 .
I find it quite impressive. Air circulation before the fan must have been really, really bad.

All of the above with the server case open on one side and a temporary fan.

Tonight I am installing a proper fan (expecting a theoretical improvement) and closing the case (which I expect will negatively compensate the better fan and worsen the overall situation a bit). My goal is to stay < 35 C degrees with the case closed without having to dremel a hole in it. I will keep you posted as I know you can't wait to hear more .

I'm certainly interested!

I'll post pictures then.

Also, please notice that the temp delta between the two HDD when under the positive effect of the fan, is CONSTANTLY 1 C degree, no exception, for the last three days. Meaning, literally (and a bit surprisingly) EVERY time one HDD temp increased by 1 C degree, the other HDD temp did so too.

When without FAN, instead, the WD was, as you may remember, between 3 and 10 C degrees cooler, temp delta being much more variable over time.

This seems to suggest that the two HDD produce different amount of heat as operating conditions change, and such temp difference is not proportional among the two. BUT, the fan seems to largely offset whatever difference there is, keeping them basically at the same temperature (almost: 1 C degree in favor of the WD, which however is BELOW the Seagate, so that alone could explain the 1 C difference).

Cool (!) phenomenon to observe, I have to say...

So, in installed the proper FAN (Noctua).

In the attached pictures you can see

1. Cooler Master temporary FAN, case open. With this setup I achieved 29/31 °C temperature, almost constant, for the WD and Seagate drives respectively.

2. Noctua NF-A9 FLX Fan, which I bought as a permanent install.

3. Nocuta included Low Noise and Ultra Low noise adapters for the FAN. I installed the Ultra Low Noise adapter, which is of course also the one producing less cooling.

4. Noctua in place. Notice how, being smaller, I could push it further in. I am hoping the fan can more effectively pull air from the bottom holes you can see in the picture when the case is closed.

5. Case closed. As you can see, there's NO ventilation holes whatsoever in the side panel.

--------------

After 30 mins up and running, case closed and Noctua FAN spinning at very low speed (Ultra Low Noise adapter), HDD are operating at

WD 34 °C
Seagate 35 °C

If they stay like this, I am going to bee happy. We'll see in few days.

... Noctua FAN was impossible to hear even being close to it, case side panel removed. Quite impressive. I suspect I could increase its speed without making it audible.

41 C
42 C

Not as good as I hoped for.

Should be much better once you cut air-intakes into that side panel.

Yes, I think so too. I will keep testing for a while (changing fan speed) before resorting to that. But, I am afraid air intakes is the only real way to go.

42°C / 45°C after one night.
I just removed the side panel to compare old fan with new fan.

I flipped the fan so that the airflow direction is now opposite (from hdds outwards), and temperature decreased to 39°C / 41°C .

37 C / 40 C . So, flipping the fan made a 4 or 5 C difference.

After increasing the fan speed, I could reach 36 C / 38 C . Not that bad after all, considering the absence of any air intake.

Ok. I am now planning to open a hole on the side panel.

Wow, good thinking to reverse the fan, and a surprising (to me, at least) change it made!

The air intake (or outtake) should dwarf all of that.

Cheers

Yes, quite surprising to me too. I did expect a change, but not so big. I find this whole story surprising in that specific regard: everything I am doing seems to produce a change 10 times bigger than I expected.

Anyway, to sum up:

I installed current 9cm fan precisely so I could push it further in, closer to the HDDs, and hopefully take advantage of the air intakes at the bottom of the case. This setup is not as good as hoped for, even setting the 9cm fan at its top speed.
Therefore, I am resorting to dremel air intakes. But this means there's no particular reason to use a 9cm fan in that particular position: I'll revert to a larger and slower (and quieter) fan.

Last time I modded a case it was years ago, so I ordered masking tape and other stuff I realized I missed. I'll probably be working on this next week.

In the mean time, I may try some other fan configuration. Actually, I am afraid the only thing I have not tried yet is a large fan with the side panel put back in place. I decided that would not work because the large fan would be right against the metal panel, but, at this point, who knows...

If you take the case completely apart perhaps a local metal working shop could do the required changes and cutting using professional tools and methods, relatively quickly and efficiently. Depending on the shop it might not be terribly expensive. I am thinking of a metal fabricator more than a car bodywork repair shop.

A good shop would also have the ability to reshape the case metal as needed to optimize the fan mounting or airflow.

Something else you could try, is using posterboard (thin cardboard) or similar materials to make an air-tube from the fan to the drives, possibly surrounding the drives on several sides. This will direct airflow to exactly where it is needed, and should improve cooling by quite a bit.

Cheers

Yes, a metal working shop would do a great job, even to just cut a hole in the side panel. But, I was thinking to do it myself. It's a fun project and the good thing is that a Cooler Master HAF XB side panel is € 8 on-line, should I destroy mine in the process

All I really need to go down to the quite remarkable 29/30 °C is, I believe, a square air intake the size of a 12 cm fan, approximately. I am thinking of a 12x12 or 10x10 square hole.

That is a relatively simple thing to do with a dremel and some patience. It won't have super round edges, but I am planning to use some rubber finishing all along the edges. Possibly not the very best and most elegant solution, but I liked it when I did it in the past.

Mark, the air-tube is going to be difficult because of all the cabling around the drives, I am afraid.

I would prefer to use sheet metal shears rather than a dremel. Much faster, less messy, potentially smoother lines.

But cut a round hole, not a square one. That way you'll better match the round fan, and have the option of attaching the fan to the side panel using the four corner screws.

Consider mounting the fan against the opening in the panel or perhaps mount the fan to the panel. The less air flow leakage between the fan housing and the exterior the more effective the cooling will be.

Alternate is to make a 10-12 cm diameter 'ring' of foam weather seal or similar and use that to create a stubby air guide 'tube' between case inside surface and the fan housing. Self adhesive weather strip is widely sold in home improvement stores in my region, available in a wide range of profiles and foam densities.

The fan specs (online?) may include a template for fan mounting, probably a large round hole with four small holes for the mounting screws. If you want a cover/grill or air filter, they are sold in sizes to match the fan mounting holes.

Some low noise fans use rubber 'pins' rather than metal screws to retain and yet isolate the fan vibrations from the panel material.

The rubber pins can also be found on eBay. But I imagine he already has a set from the Noctua fan.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

Yes, round hole also sounds a great idea (and I have plenty of rubber pins, actually). The only issue with the idea of attaching the fan to the side panel is that the side panel is completely removable and I'd have to disconnect the fan form the MoBo (or from the extension cable) every time I remove the side panel to open the case. Not a big annoyance, but still, I'd rather avoid that.
The foam weather seal is a great idea, I'll do that. I should have some already!


Now, some more interesting news: 9cm fan, full speed, side panel completely removed, and temperature does not decrease below 35 C / 37 C ! So, the SIZE of the fan seems to have a significant impact in this particular case.

So, guys, the only reason I mentioned a square hole is that I've been using a dremel in the past and I needed square holes back then . In this case, as soon as you mentioned a round hole (which makes perfect sense, of course), I thought of a simple hole saw, like this:

http://www.amazon.it/Sourcingmap-a121205...zza+per+metallo

Does it make sense, or am I making it all too easy?

In my experience, those types of hole saws make a complete mess in sheet metal. Don't do it.

Really, just a set of (green or red) aviation snips is all you need. Useful for other stuff too, once you have them.

Eg. These: http://www.amazon.it/meccanici-meccanism...sr_1_13?s=tools

Just draw the circle on the panel with a marker or pencil, drill a 3/8" starter hole anywhere inside the circle, insert tip of aviation snips into hole, and start cutting.

Thanks Mark. I never used hole saw in metal in general...

I use them for lots of things here, including cutting holes in doors prior to installing the latch/knob assemblies. Exterior doors are often clad in sheet metal, and the hole saws scuff up the paint around the hole edges by many mm.

And that's with 2-3cm of wood core inside the door to help center the bit. Not a precise implement.

For thin (most) sheet metal, step drills are best for small round holes, nibbling tools are great for small rectangular holes, and snips are hard to beat for anything larger.

Cheers

... because I am impatient and I do not own (yet) snips, as a temporary solution I decided to

- reinstall the 12mm fan
- make some small holes, approximatiely in a circle, on the side panel, by using a regular drill with metal bits (which I do own).

Side panel has been in place for 1 hr and temps are
34 C
36 C

Also, i can't hear anthing.

Pretty good

And thank you again everyone for your precious recommendations!

I'll take my time to create one large hole, finish the job, and make the side panel nice looking again. Not that it is horrible now, I have to say.

... and so I have to take that back. Not good. Temp increased up to 42/44, so the few holes I made are not sufficient.

Would it be ok to use a 10cm hole saw (which I do have) to create a 10cm hole, and then enlarge it to 12 by using snips, once I get them and practice using them?

Or alternatively, take a 6mm drill bit and make a lot of small holes in a nice symmetrical round pattern.

tanstaafl.

Yes, that is an option too Doug. The ones i made are already larger than 6 and pretty random, though, so i'll probably resort cutting a big round hole somehow...

Tin snips, man. Just practice on paper or plastic first. Just like scissors, except they only go around a circle in one direction. The red one goes one way, the green cuts from the other direction. Don't touch the yellow ones for this job!

Practice is easy: just draw/trace a couple of concentric circles inside the real/final larger circle. Practice on the inner circles, then graduate to the outer real one. Has the benefit that larger circles are easier, too.

You mentioned earlier that you already plan to wrap the cut edges with something, so absolute perfection isn't needed. Black gaffer tape is an excellent edge wrap, if you don't want to bother with something more specialized.

Cheers

Mark, ok, I'll see if I can refrain from using that tempting hole saw and break the case side panel, and wait to get those snipping tools.

Jokes apart, I just did not want to keep the server open and do something temporary in the mean time. But the truth is, server case can be left open no problem. I'm just impatient to have some fun with this.

Thanks again.

You do realize, I hope, that once you finish with this project, you will need to install some sort of drip pan underneath your server, because if you ever turn the server off, all the frost and ice that has accumulated on the hard drives is going to melt and leak onto the floor as they comes back up to room temperature.



tanstaafl.

How about moving the server on a shelf over my kitchen sink?

So, on a more serious note, I've been observing temps, of course, for few days - 12cm fan and no side panel.

They did not stay at 29/30. They increased up to 33/34 (please notice how the delta is almost constantly 1 °c between the two hdd), to stabilize more or less at 31/32 . My best guess is that it depends on the environment temperature. I am now curious to see how the hot Rome summer would affect the system (of course, I'll turn on AC at some point, so...).

It can be useful to review the entire airflow path through the equipment. Not just the air flow in, through the fan, and around the hard drives.

Examine the air flow route beyond the drive locations. What restrictions impede the air trying to exit the case? Does the airflow have to go around tight corners, past large cable bundles, etc?

Are there other fans in the case that assist, oppose or influence the new cooling fan's air flow?

In a good airflow configuration the temperature difference between ambient and drive should be relatively consistent, for a given drive workload (heat output).

A good fan driven cooling arrangement should maintain the hard disc temperature rise to a fairly modest delta. What temp differences are you seeing above ambient?

K447,

My server case has two main sections. The section above for Mother Board, Video Card, CPU, expansion cards, etc, is extremely well cooled. Two 12cm Noctua Case Fans, plus 1 14cm CPU heatsink fan, produce what i consider an ideal airflow.

Underneath, case section devoted to PSU, Optic unit, HDD, is instead poorly cooled. There is no fan other than the one mentioned in this thread. ALso, there is not much space, and several cables (fromt he PSU to the above section and to two SSDs, 2 HDDs, and DVD reader), and SATA cables to all the same units from the above motherboard.

So, yes, you are correct, air flow is actually significantly compromised by all cabling. I was thinking precisely to see if I can re-route them in some more orderly way to improve the situation.

I do not have a thermometer in my studio, but I'd guess the room is around 25°C . Delta between environment and HDDs is therefore between 5°C and 10 °C

Edit:
Bottom section has 2 locations for 2 8cm fans. Unfortunately, they'd be at the opposite side of the HDDs, separated from them by a lot of cables, which is why I decided to go with a larger fan close to the HDDs (see pictures above) and related case modding that I've been mentioning in this thread.

One more test with flipping the fan (still large one, case side panel removed).

30/31°C vs 36/37°C .

Quite amazing.

Guys (mostly Mark), is it normal the snips (which I have finally received) are very (very) hard to use on my case side panel? I managed to make some small cut, but they require a lot of strength.
My uneducated guess is that the metal panel is relatively thick. All the videos I saw on line, admittedly, seem to be using the snips on thinner metal sheets than my case side panel.

Mmm.. the case sides could be thicker than I thought. One trick is to open the shears as wide as possible, so that the cut is done from closer to the hinge on the shears. More leverage and control from there.

The temptation is to cut with the tips of the blades, so overcome that thought and use the part of the blades as close as possible to the pivots.

Did any one mention sheet metal nibbling tools for this job.

Yes, cutting closer to the blade hinges is surely helping. Still hard though. No big deal, I am still trying, if it really does not work, I'll think of something else. I still have the hole saw or dremel options.

Yes, up a few posts. Best for smaller holes and straighter lines.

Liquid gallium and fisticuffs? (Only works if your case is made of aluminium.)

Peter

Thank you Taym overall for sharing your experiences with the 8TB archive drive from Seagate. I may now seek out a pair of them.

In my absence, a 2 TB seagate drive in the NAS that holds the backups for this site went into a degraded. It's up over 1000 uncorrectable errors. And unfortunately the second drive in the RAID 1 pair also has some issues spinning up at times, so the mirror was out of sync. I ignored some warning signs that this could happen, so the outcome isn't too surprising.

It's got me rethinking my home storage overall now, earlier then planned. Thankfully backups for the site are okay still, as they are now being routed to my second NAS that runs RAID 5 across 4 disks.

One unfortunate thing, I can't find a retailer that stocks these 8TB drives in a SATA internal form factor. I share some of Mark's concerns over buying such high capacity spinning disks from an online retailer. The warranty goes out the window if the casing of the external drives that hold this 8TB archive drive is removed.

Temp wise, the drives in the failing NAS never went above 35C during their busy times of trying to resync.

To my knowledge, I don't have any way of buying drives except from an online retailer. My favoured Central London PC retailer (Yoyotech, just off Tottenham Court Road) closed their retail store a couple of years ago. Sure, there's PC World or Maplin, but they're not the cheapest at the best of times, and 8TB NAS drives are a little bit niche.

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 .

Just want to try something different, and the WD80EFZX is the only other low power 8TB drive available. Locally, it costs about CAD$60 more than the Seagate.

I paid the USD$30 ransom for a hassle-free RMA with 2-way shipping included. The replacement Seagate 8TB drive arrived today via UPS, and has been inserted into the system's backup array (currently re-syncing 4TB of data to it).

All good for now.

This escapade forced me to finally deal with the 99% full backup array, by replacing one of its 4TB drives with the RMA replacement 8TB drive. Now the backup array is the same size (20TB) as the main array. Yay!

That turns out to have been US$30 wasted. The replacement drive has already developed numerous bad sectors -- I guess they must've just reformatted somebody else's failed drive and shipped it to me.

So.. off to the local shop again later today for another WD Red drive.

Cheers

This is very useful info Mark! It seems Seagate's bad rep is still not totally unwarranted. Just when I was in doubt of giving them another chance because I'm looking for an 8 GB drive specifically for backup reasons... (mainly because of the price) I guess I'll just bite the bullet and spend the extra cash to buy me a WD 8 GB drive.

I do admit I have fewer complaints with WD. Not zero, but a lot fewer. The only reason for the Seagate drives here (4TB and 8TB) was that they became available much earlier and are much less pricey than WD's similar models.

Now that WD has 8TB, they do appear to be the better choice.

A non zero and increasing Reallocated Sector Ct and Seek Error Rate on a brand new drive is a bad sign, right ?

Just picked up 3 4TB WD drives to upgrade my ZFS mirror. I'm swapping the first drive in and it is showing errors

Those couldn't be caused by a dodgy connection I assume ?

They are all WD40EZRZ (I'm now regretting not picking up three different model drives like I did last time).

Reallocated sector count should be zero. Otherwise replace the drive.
The Seek Error Rate is a normal non-zero thing. Ignore it.

Bad cabling will produce UDMA CRC errors rather than the others.

Cheers

..but noticeably noisier than the Seagate drives they replaced.

The 8TB Seagates were silent. Nothing there, any noise from them was masked by the very gentle airflow of the case fans in the HTPC box.

The WD Red 8TB have a noticeable low frequency "thumping noise" that sounds kinda like the kid across the street (300' away) bouncing his basketball.

Very subtle, and distracting. And those two drives are already on silicone isolation mounts.

Someday..

What would a sketchy power feed cause?

Your guess is as good as mine there. Clean power is a necessity for digital, and without it all kinds of weird stuff can happen.

Cheers

Thanks

I plugged the second drive into the same SATA cable/power and successfully wrote 2TB to it, so I guess I'll be returning the first drive. I still need to test the third one.

At this point in the process I'm wishing I'd used FreeNAS for my ZFS array rather than Ubuntu. The ten step process to replace each drive is a little tedious and error prone (I've already accidentally over written a partition table on one disk).

It would be a great deal easier if I wasn't being a cheapskate and not using the same 3 drives I'm mirroring under ZFS to also boot Ubuntu using a standard Linux mirrored array.

- add new drive
- copy partition table from existing drive
- randomise guid partition labels on new drive
- resize the ZFS partition on the new drive from ~2TB to ~4TB
- dd the boot partition over from old drive
- fail and remove the old drive from the Linux RAID mirror
- add the new drive to the Linux RAID mirror
- replace the old drive with the new drive in the ZFS mirror
- run grub install
- wait 10+ hours for the Linux mirror and ZFS to rebuild

Repeat three times and hope at the end of it all that ZFS correctly expands into the new space...

Yeah. Sharing the boot drive into a RAID leads to all sorts of complications. Usually a USB stick or small SSD is used for that.

Cheers