Any bad experiences with ironwolf 8tb yet?

[southwow]

Thinking about mixing in a few of the IronWolf 8tb drives.

Does anyone have reason to believe these are unreliable?

I'm running a mix of Reds and Seagate desktop drives ATM, the desktop drives are nearing warranty end date so I'm eliminating them from the pool one at a time..

 

[Inxsible]

Thinking about mixing in a few of the IronWolf 8tb drives.

Does anyone have reason to believe these are unreliable?

I'm running a mix of Reds and Seagate desktop drives ATM, the desktop drives are nearing warranty end date so I'm eliminating them from the pool one at a time..

I have 2 6TB Ironwolfs in my setup and they are 7200RPM disks. They do run quite a bit hotter than my Seagate Constellation drives. I have set up SMART alert temps at 45C and I still get daily critical emails (or rather I used to until they stopped 2 months ago due to a bug). But when I log in via WebUI or ssh and see the logs, I have alerts every day for those 2 drives but none for my Seagate Constellation drives

Seagate has started differentiating between Ironwolfs now similar to what WD does with it's RED/Pro RED range:

Ironwolf -- 5900RPM
Ironwolf Pro -- 7200RPM

However, on newegg, I have seen the 5900RPM only for 1,2,3&4TB sizes. 6,8 & 10 are still only in the 7200RPM. So, you need to decide if you need the speed or lower temperatures and accordingly select which one you want.

It is difficult to find new 5400RPM desktop drives these days. How hot do your Seagate desktop drives run currently and are they 7200RPM disks?

 

[southwow]

I previously had a few alarms over the past 3 years of using the constellation and shucked archive drives, but nothing critical. At the time I was using backplanes with internal cooling and a tower case standing vertically, so the drives at the top took the bulk of the heat.

I've since migrated to a supermicro 846. The fan wall does a fairly good job of keeping the drives cool as long as you plug the holes with the blank/dummy drive trays.

The desktop drives seems to last and last. I had some issues with the 5TB ones, but the 8's are rock solid.

Heat never even entered my mind as these are allegedly NAS drives, so thanks for bringing it up! I think I'll grab 3 of the 8's as newegg has them for around $200 right now and see how they do. Spindle speed doesn't seem to make a difference, so I'd rather stick to cooler drives if possible.looks like I really only have 7200 as an options, though.

 

[Inxsible]

If you have had good experience with the desktop drives, why are you switching them out with NAS drives? Or did you mean the desktop drives were $200 for 8TB?

 

[Chris Moore]

Thinking about mixing in a few of the IronWolf 8tb drives.

Does anyone have reason to believe these are unreliable?

I'm running a mix of Reds and Seagate desktop drives ATM, the desktop drives are nearing warranty end date so I'm eliminating them from the pool one at a time..

We have had a couple users shuck these:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822179033
Only $165 for 8TB and they are Seagate Barracuda drives.

 

[Stux]

My 8TB iron wolfs have been fine. They do run hotter than i’d prefer.

 

[silverback]

I have been running 6 of them for almost a year. Last summer I had to raise the temperature alert to 50C. With additional fans they were running in the mid to high 40's. Still well within specified operating range. It will be interesting to see how long they last.

 

[southwow]

@Chris Moore , I've shucked 15-20 of those exact drives (10 from NewEgg using that very link) and they're a mix of desktop and archive drives. There doesn't seem to be any consistency and the model numbers are all the same.

@Inxsible , I've not had a failure of an 8tb in nearly 2+ years which means they're probably going to be a nightmare scenario when they finally do begin to fail. I'd rather re-purpose them somewhere that I'm not going to have to drive to my storage unit, haul 2500 dvds and blu-rays, an uncountable number of CD's, and seemingly millions of flash cards, cd's and dvd's of photos back to my house, and begin the endless task of restoring the data.

Maybe knowing my configuration will help: I have 5 vdevs of 3 drives each. I've upgraded it several times over the years and grown the pool. Basically, I have a drive that can fail on each vdev. If two fail, I'm toast. That didn't really matter when I was using < 1TB drives, but now the data set has grown (i.e. as I dedicated time to ripping my legally owned collection of movies over the last 5 years) to a size that is impossible to back up in multiple locations without using a cloud service.

Early on, I had a drive fail while reslivering. it wasn't so bad as I had about 1TB of photos and music. it didn't matter because I had a tape backup.

it doesn't really scare me, but I'd rather buy hard drives than trust a cloud provider to give me my data back intact for an obscene amount of money.

The solution looks like one of these: create a mirror of my current pool using larger drives... or add spares to each pool? Anyone have a suggestion

 

[southwow]

Sorry, I meant "Add spares to each VDEV", not POOL

i liked the seagate constellation drives, they were rock solid when I used them at work. We had very few failures, but again... this was back in the day of the < 1TB drive.

Last edit, i swear:
I just want to have a healthy mix of drives. I believe I still have about 6 of the shucked drives in my pool and each one has a WD Red in the vdev.

 

[Inxsible]

@Chris Moore , I've shucked 15-20 of those exact drives (10 from NewEgg using that very link) and they're a mix of desktop and archive drives. There doesn't seem to be any consistency and the model numbers are all the same.

Once you shucked them and found that they were archive drives, did you return RMA the product or did you end up using the archive drive in your pool? Other threads on this forum have warned against using Archive drives.

Basically, I have a drive that can fail on each vdev. If two fail, I'm toast.

Maybe you should re-create the pool using RaidZ2 this time.

Sorry, I meant "Add spares to each VDEV"

I don't think you can do that. Unless you meant cold spares that you keep around in the event that a drive fails.

 

[southwow]

@Inxsible , I've had zero problems with them. They 'may' be slower, but no failures in over 2 years and only 1 detach that was actually a physical issue with bad alignment on a backplane board (istarusa used to be good stuff).

Without searching, I'd guess I was probably using these before anyone on the forums reported issues. Again, no problems whatsoever with onboard SAS or M1015 with at least two boards now. I can give you serial numbers, pictures of the actual drives, and the serial numbers of the enclosures if that helps anyone. I even labelled them for return so I can map drive to enclosure. I shucked my first 2TB drives from USB enclosures around 2009. Before that time, they were more expensive than retail boxed desktop drives.

The first drives that I definitely encountered that mapped to Archive drives (not on the label) were the 4 and 5tb seagates. They died quickly as did their desktop counterparts. As they failed, I RMA'd them and have quite a stack laying around (15 or so).

I began switching to 8's in early 2016 when seagate released the 8tb USB drives. I initially bought one, used it to back up my DLNA and Plex movie server, and am still using it to this day as a partial backup set. I began shucking them to replace the 5TB shortly thereafter when the price fell from 299.00 to 239.00 or so. Around black friday of 2016, I purchased 10 of them from newegg and 3 from BestBuy at $199.00 (all with USB hub built into the enclosure) and upsized my 2 and 5tb drive vdevs to 8tb drives. I've had 0 drive failures since eliminating the 5's. I'd guess half of these units have drives physically labelled "Archive", none of them are refurbished. I didn't keep track of which came from what supplier, but I can tell you that the first ones I shucked were labelled that way and they came from BestBuy right off of the store shelf.

 

[southwow]

So, heads-up, I can't find anyone complaining about the archive drives on the freenas forum. I searched "Seagate Archive" and scanned 5 pages of posts. Can somebody point me to one of them so I can post my experience and post some pictures? TIA

 

[Inxsible]

The only drive I have shucked is a WD My Passport 500GB which I had bought for $170 (super expensive compared to now) and the reason I shucked it was that the button on the drive to start it, stopped working, so I thought the drive had crapped itself and I opened it up just for sh!ts & giggles. Glad I did though. The drive was in perfect working order. I have since used that drive in my desktop and it runs great even now after more than 9 years.

 

[southwow]

The only drive I have shucked is a WD My Passport 500GB which I had bought for $170 (super expensive compared to now) and the reason I shucked it was that the button on the drive to start it, stopped working, so I thought the drive had crapped itself and I opened it up just for sh!ts & giggles. Glad I did though. The drive was in perfect working order. I have since used that drive in my desktop and it runs great even now after more than 9 years.

was it a 2.5"?

 

[Inxsible]

was it a 2.5"?

Nope a 3.5"

 

[southwow]

The only drive I have shucked is a WD My Passport 500GB which I had bought for $170 (super expensive compared to now) and the reason I shucked it was that the button on the drive to start it, stopped working, so I thought the drive had crapped itself and I opened it up just for sh!ts & giggles. Glad I did though. The drive was in perfect working order. I have since used that drive in my desktop and it runs great even now after more than 9 years.

For seagate, it's actually cheaper to buy the USB drive with a 2 year warranty than it is for a boxed version of the same drive. Pretty crazy! I always buy my WD's OEM, but I'm tempted to grab some easystores and crack them open.

 

[Chris Moore]

@Chris Moore , I've shucked 15-20 of those exact drives (10 from NewEgg using that very link) and they're a mix of desktop and archive drives. There doesn't seem to be any consistency and the model numbers are all the same.

@Inxsible , I've not had a failure of an 8tb in nearly 2+ years which means they're probably going to be a nightmare scenario when they finally do begin to fail. I'd rather re-purpose them somewhere that I'm not going to have to drive to my storage unit, haul 2500 dvds and blu-rays, an uncountable number of CD's, and seemingly millions of flash cards, cd's and dvd's of photos back to my house, and begin the endless task of restoring the data.

Maybe knowing my configuration will help: I have 5 vdevs of 3 drives each. I've upgraded it several times over the years and grown the pool. Basically, I have a drive that can fail on each vdev. If two fail, I'm toast. That didn't really matter when I was using < 1TB drives, but now the data set has grown (i.e. as I dedicated time to ripping my legally owned collection of movies over the last 5 years) to a size that is impossible to back up in multiple locations without using a cloud service.

Early on, I had a drive fail while reslivering. it wasn't so bad as I had about 1TB of photos and music. it didn't matter because I had a tape backup.

it doesn't really scare me, but I'd rather buy hard drives than trust a cloud provider to give me my data back intact for an obscene amount of money.

The solution looks like one of these: create a mirror of my current pool using larger drives... or add spares to each pool? Anyone have a suggestion

I have a solution to that, but I'll say more about it when I'm home and can type on the computer

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SGH-I537 using Tapatalk

 

[Stux]

Would suggest working out how to switch to RaidZ2.

You have 15 drives.

Perhaps you should consider 2 8-way RaidZ2 vdevs.

 

[Chris Moore]

@Stux beat me to the question phase... Are you done adding storage or do you still need to grow more? What is the capacity you see yourself growing to in the next 3 to 5 years?

PS. What kind of chassis are you mounting all these drives in? Would you give a rundown on your hardware?

 

[Pheran]

I've had nothing but trouble with Seagate Ironwolf 10TB drives. I can't say if the problem extends to the 8TB or lower drives, but at this point I won't buy any Ironwolf drive for FreeNAS.

 

[Johnnie Black]

I've shucked 15-20 of those exact drives (10 from NewEgg using that very link) and they're a mix of desktop and archive drives. There doesn't seem to be any consistency and the model numbers are all the same.

Note that if the desktop model is the ST8000DM004 it's also an SMR drive, like the Archive drives.