Seagate Archive 8TB [Discussion moved]

[Arwen]

I just got my Seagate Archive 8TB SMR, (Shingled Magnetic Recording), drive.
Here is my setup;

Source system:

• FreeNAS Mini
• 4 x 4TB WD Reds in RAID-Z2

Destination:

• Backups only
  
• eSATA port on FreeNAS Mini
• eSATA enclosure
• Seagate Archive 8TB SMR drive as own ZFS pool

That all seems to work. Just ran my first backup, which is 1TB of used space on the FreeNAS.

I made the copy with "rsync" crossing mount points, which at end said it averaged 33MB per
second :-(. Oh, well. Was not planning on any other use except backing up my FreeNAS.

One thing I think could have helped is TRIM / DISCARD support in the Seagate SMR drive. If
the drive knew what was not in use, then their would be less need to move data around. Since
ZFS supports TRIM / DISCARD, as well as COW, (Copy On Write), these SMR drives could
really work well for ZFS writes.

Note that I REALLY wanted to use a checksumming file system like ZFS or BTRFS for this SMR
drive. That way I have a chance to detect bad data caused by firmware bugs. So as part of my
backup routine, I'll run a scrub before I start the next backup.

 

[marbus90]

Try with ZFS send | receive. That's not touching individual files but streaming a full ZFS snapshot over to the new drive, which helps with the speed.

 

[diedrichg]

Was there a question in the op?

 

[Tywin]

Try with ZFS send | receive. That's not touching individual files but streaming a full ZFS snapshot over to the new drive, which helps with the speed.

Agreed, I would like to see this metric as well. I would also have liked to see some dd tests to get an idea of the raw sequential speeds, but no need to wipe your data now ;)

 

[marbus90]

Was there a question in the op?

Doesn't need to be. There's a big fat tag "DISCUSSION" next to the Thread Title.

 

[diedrichg]

Doesn't need to be. There's a big fat tag "DISCUSSION" next to the Thread Title.

Can't see that on Tapatalk, but thanks for putting me in my place.

 

[Arwen]

Was there a question in the op?

Nope, just a discussion of Seagate's SMR drives.

 

[Arwen]

Try with ZFS send | receive. That's not touching individual files but streaming a full ZFS snapshot over to the new drive, which helps with the speed.

Agreed, I would like to see this metric as well. I would also have liked to see some dd tests to get an idea of the raw sequential speeds, but no need to wipe your data now ;)

Yes, my eventual plan is to make the 8TB drive have the same ZFS datasets, (though without the various sharing attributes), as the source. Then script a series of "zfs send" / "zfs receive" per dataset. (Plus, give me a nice log file with times and any errors. And I always read my logs after backups.)

As for general speed, I can probably do some read tests.

In fact, if my little, low power server comes in sooner than the 5 weeks I was quoted, I can backup to it. That would give me confidence to wipe the 8TB drive and perform more write tests.

But in the mean time, I have a SSD firmware update to do, un-related to FreeNAS. Except that the FreeNAS is my backups! (My SSD is slowing down due to a firmware bug, so I need multiple backups before I perform the update.)

 

[Arwen]

Another discussion on SMR drives was started below. It's more active, so lets move over.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/seagate-8tb-archive-drive-in-freenas.27740/