Seagate 4 TB drive. Anyone tried them?

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Lucien

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So I was going to finally get my long delayed FreeNAS box up and running. Prices for hard drives have finally reached sane levels where I am, and there didn't seem to be any major problems with the WD 3 TB Reds.

Then Seagate realeased a 4 TB, 5900 rpm drive. The ST4000DM000, for only a bit more than the 3 TB Red. Was just about to pick some up this week and then I saw the announcement on Seagate's new NAS line, which includes a new 4 TB drive, the ST4000VN000. Needless to say, it isn't as simple as me being just able to pop into a local store and pick up one of the new drives. I guess it'll be a bit before they're widely available in the retail channel, and local distributors seem to be slow to boot.

So in the meantime, I thought I'd ask if anyone has any experience with / opinions on either of the Seagate 4 TB drives. Specwise they both seem the same, and I'm guessing the only difference is in the firmware secret sauce. For FreeNAS use, will it make any difference which way I go? Would I be able to mix the two?
 

jgreco

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The DM's have been making appearances for $149 on sale (see off-topic forum). The VN's are just now available in the last week or so (NewEgg has them in stock). NewEgg seems to be the place to go for both these drives; wholesale channel pricing/availability and other retail options aren't too hot. Best Buy carries the retail box kit version though, so emergency replacement is feasible.

I'd been holding off buying 4TB's for quite some time because the only option had been the totally awesome Hitachi's, except that HGST got sold to WD and the stock of drives seemed to be old manufactured stock. We do have some of the 7K4000's and they'd been problem-free, but the usual caveats about running very warm, etc. And we're historically a bit of a Seagate shop.

So I did pull the trigger finally, because at $149, well. I don't know if I'd have waited for the NAS series had I known. But basically the model here was that I wanted to build an 8+3=11 drive RAIDZ3 (~30TB usable) in a 24-drive chassis, so we picked up 12 drives to perfectly fill half the chassis, with one available for hot spare, and then another drive for cold spare in inventory.

With things framed that way.

1) As with the WD Red's, the firmware is likely to be a little different. I'm guessing TLER is the substantial tweak. The typical wisd0m is that "TLER doesn't matter" for "software RAID" but that's not true ... the hardware RAID units need TLER because arrays may drop a failing drive out without it, but even for software RAID, your server is presumably serving data, and multi-minute hangs while trying to read data will cause severe problems. TLER is good.

But I'm aggressive about pulling problematic drives. So if there's actually a problem, out comes the failing drive, in goes a replacement, and so I feel the benefits of TLER for our use here aren't that compelling.

2) Been playing with the Sea's and they are not speed demons, but then again it is a 5900.

3) You can definitely mix the two. Really, with SATA, there's no good reason that you cannot mix and match, and it is even considered best practice to do so to whatever extent is possible, to avoid a bunch of disks failing due to a problem with a certain batch.
 

SirGCal

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I've got 8 of em, I'll tell ya in a few months once I get to set it up and test it for a while. I was going to make my windows array on my LSI controller, but isntead I might keep that going on it's current 12TB setup and setup this one on ZFS using a simple SATA card instead of upgrading that one. I have everything else already anyhow accept a controller card so this would be the next logical step... Testing to commence.

I plan on doing Raid Z2 with this setup, and possibly a 12-drive setup for work with Raid Z3 and a hot spare or two.

Drive validations take FOREVER!!! OMG! So far, from the horrible OEM shipping methods, out of 12 so far, I've had to return 8... Started buying Retails instead. Much better luck. No returns on them thus far. Done buying OEM from online markets. Just not worth it for their entire lack of any shipping practices.

Ohh also, they are fast as heck, especially for 5400 RPM drives... I'm seeing over 100M reads and writes. Way better then my Samsung drives I used in my last set of arrays. WAY better. Just keep em cool (critical). It was time to replace them anyhow and I'm out of room so... I'm not a Seagate fan and WD lost me a long time ago and the Reds make me cringe but... These so far have me happy, if I can just get ones that work.
 

JayG30

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Late to reply, but if you haven't seen the review HERE on the Seagate NAS drives, give it a look.
I'd certainly get the Seagate's over the WD Reds. Not just because I've had bad luck with WD drives, but because they seem to outpace them at every turn. Certainly they won't be as fast as a 7200 drive, but that isn't really a fair comparison and would be another question entirely.
I have 6 of the ST4000VN000 drives coming in (will have tomorrow).
 

SirGCal

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Having tons of issues with shipping problems... LOTS of returns. Haven't been able to start testing yet. Sorry for the delays... Still waiting for the last 2 drives to get started.
 

Z300M

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So I was going to finally get my long delayed FreeNAS box up and running. Prices for hard drives have finally reached sane levels where I am, and there didn't seem to be any major problems with the WD 3 TB Reds.

Then Seagate realeased a 4 TB, 5900 rpm drive. The ST4000DM000, for only a bit more than the 3 TB Red. Was just about to pick some up this week and then I saw the announcement on Seagate's new NAS line, which includes a new 4 TB drive, the ST4000VN000. Needless to say, it isn't as simple as me being just able to pop into a local store and pick up one of the new drives. I guess it'll be a bit before they're widely available in the retail channel, and local distributors seem to be slow to boot.

So in the meantime, I thought I'd ask if anyone has any experience with / opinions on either of the Seagate 4 TB drives. Specwise they both seem the same, and I'm guessing the only difference is in the firmware secret sauce. For FreeNAS use, will it make any difference which way I go? Would I be able to mix the two?
I haven't used any internal HDs larger than 2TB, and I've bought nothing but Seagate for years (except for Hitachi for a notebook). One thing you need to watch, however, is the way drives are packed for shipping: I've seen recent user reports on NewEgg complaining that drives were simply thrown in a box with some bubble wrap to fill the space (rather than bubble wrap around each drive) and arrived with the covers dented.. OTOH, the Seagate "bare drive" I bought from NewEgg last year came in its own carton inside the NewEgg shipping carton and with plenty of bubble wrap or paper in between -- I no longer recall which. The Seagate "bare drives" I bought from Tiger Direct two years ago came in individual plastic "bubbles"; I have two more on order right now from Tiger Direct, so I hope they come adequately packed.
 

SirGCal

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The NEWEGG Bare Drive shipping is very hit/miss... I'm having a large go-around right now on a near $600 RMA cause three drives were physically damaged... They said they would do it (weren't going to but after talking with me)... Still waiting... I stopped buying bare drives and paid more for Retail packaged drives for their better packaging. I almost have 8 drives to begin... Went through 14 drives so far to get to this point though...
 

joeschmuck

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Late to reply, but if you haven't seen the review HERE on the Seagate NAS drives, give it a look.
I'd certainly get the Seagate's over the WD Reds. Not just because I've had bad luck with WD drives, but because they seem to outpace them at every turn. Certainly they won't be as fast as a 7200 drive, but that isn't really a fair comparison and would be another question entirely.
I have 6 of the ST4000VN000 drives coming in (will have tomorrow).
I can't argue that the Seagate drives tested better but then again you need to take into consideration that the WD Red drives are 5400 RPM where the Seagate drives are 5900 RPM something that was not clearly pointed out in the article. Of course if I were buying replacement drives, I would buy the Seagate drives too based on what I read, but I'd buy 2 or 3TB drives, I have no need for the 4TB drives unless there was a huge sale.
 

jgreco

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One DOA (not technically dead but failed SMART long test) out of 12, others are passing the 1000 hour mark shortly.
 

JayG30

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I can't argue that the Seagate drives tested better but then again you need to take into consideration that the WD Red drives are 5400 RPM where the Seagate drives are 5900 RPM something that was not clearly pointed out in the article. Of course if I were buying replacement drives, I would buy the Seagate drives too based on what I read, but I'd buy 2 or 3TB drives, I have no need for the 4TB drives unless there was a huge sale.


True, they could have made that more clear. From what I've always noticed, StorageReview seems to be geared more to the "above average" consumer. I suspect they figure those that are reading the review are aware of what the Red drives specs are (they do link to the WD Red review). Plus, I think the major point is that both the WD and Seagate's are "NAS" drives and so drawing comparisons against each other makes sense. A good question I think is "why aren't the WD's 5900RPM"? I'll have to look again, but I think the Seagates are rated for a longer life (not that it really matters) and I bet the power usage numbers are similar. As long as the drive is reliable, doesn't draw to much power, remains cool and quite, why not speed it up a bit?

EDIT: Published Specs
(Seagate | WD Red 3TB)
Power Consumption
Operating 4.8W | 4.4W
Idle 3.95W | 4.1W
Standby 0.5W | 0.6W
Acoustics
Seek 2.5 bels (25dBA) | 24dBA
Idle 2.3 bels (23dBA) | 23dBA


My 6 Seagate 4TB NAS (ST4000VN000) drives came in and I've got them running in raidz2. I've been doing some testing over the weekend.
So far, I'm very happy. I haven't seen a problem with any of my drives yet. Ordered them all at the same time from Newegg. They shipped in a foam container that segregated each drive (like a milk cartoon for hard drives) and were wrapped with bubble wrap. So far they have been very quite and very cool. The drives seem to perform as reported in the review(s).

I've not had a WD Red drive to compare it to. Honestly, I've heard to many bad things about them to even bother. Couple that with the fact that every single bad drive I've had in the past has been a WD, I'm just not interested in buying them anymore.
 

joeschmuck

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That's funny because I've not heard anything really bad about the WD Red drives. No high failure rates except due to improper shipping of course. They are slightly slower but they are a low power slow drive, everyone should know this when buying them. It's always a risk no matter which brand you buy so I think the most important factor someone should look at is reliability and then the warranty period.
 

SirGCal

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FreeNAS was not able to handle the SATA controller card for the system I used. I ended up having to go to a full Linux kernel instead. Ubuntu in this case. However the drives did take ZFS no problem, RAIDZ2, without any issues, on 8 drives, and have since nearly fully populated them without any errors. So as far as the drives are concerned, I can't complain. FreeBSD/NAS just needs some drivers added for the particular SATA PCIe cards I used that were all Linux 2.6 stable and worked in all other Linux flavors. I was working with those particular peoples and I suspect they'll address that issues in an upcoming release. But any concern over the drives themselves; they should be just peachy...
 

joeschmuck

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I know this is off topic but which SATA controller card?
 

SirGCal

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I know this is off topic but which SATA controller card?

Sorry, I've been in the hospital. My MS decided to kick my backside hard... Still won't be home for a few weeks... The card was this one. I have a lot of posts on it here too:

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?p=227906

Still trying to find workarounds for it. Perhaps I missed something, or the newest kernels, etc. Just haven't been home to continue testing.
 

Lucien

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Nov 13, 2011
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Well... My local retailers still don't seem to have the Seagate NAS drives available... This looks like it could take a while.

Since I'm not in the US, Newegg isn't even a consideration. Which might be a good thing.
 
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