So how are these 8TB Seagate Archive disks shaking out? Some of the original posters have had these now going on 6+ months.
I'm kicking around picking up 3 or 4 of these 8TB drives for a dedicated backup server. Drives would be setup as either RaidZ1 or RaidZ2.
3x 8TB RaidZ1 = 14.6TB (Est. $720)
4x 8TB RaidZ2 = 14.6TB (Est. $960)
Is the lack of TLER a show-stopper for using these with ZFS/RaidZ? I would be writing to these drives maybe a couple times per month when long-term backups run. I'm guessing that running RaidZ2 would lessen any negative effects of not having TLER as I could always just pull the drive that is hanging everything up and still have some redundancy, right?
The other alternative was to pick up two of the USB 3.0 8TB externally cased Archive drives and use those independently. However, being USB external drives, it would probably be difficult to run ZFS on them and even then, they would not correct errors when scrubbed (just recognize the error).
Thoughts?
My 8TB Seagate SMR is working just fine as a single disk ZFS pool for backups. Reads upto 150MBps, and
writes about 30MBps using RSync with whole file copies. Since I have the space, about 1.2TB used in my
FreeNAS at present, I am performing full copies using RSync. Later when the 8TB disk is full, I'll delete the
oldest. When the source get's over 4TB used, then I'll move to RSync incrementals for this backup drive.
Understand that these are slower for continuous writing, (like my 1TB backups). Burst writing is different.
Probably reasonable. If you use differential RSync, which copies only changed data, then it would likely run
faster. Both because it's not copying the same data, AND what data it is copying maybe smaller than the higher
speed non-shingled disk space cache. (I read somewhere that this is 20GBs of space...)
Using RAID-Z1 may be problematic. The comments about drives larger than about 3TB state that you can get
a failed disk read during a replacement disk re-sync process. Thus, causing RAID-5 & RAID-Z1 to fail. So the
general recommendation is to use RAID-6 or RAID-Z2.
I do use mine with an external eSATA enclosure. It's a decent box, with 2 hot swap disk bays, fan and USB 3.0
with UAS as well. This is so I can remove the drive and take it off site, (where it is right now). Natually I don't
use that enclosure's builtin HW RAID...
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00M77UOC8/?tag=ozlp-20
One last comment. I can't use ZFS send and receive. It seems like a useful feature, but I needed my 8TB backup
drive to have ZFS for Linux compatibility, (older ZPool version). Thus, if my FreeNAS melts into a puddle, (or is
stolen), I can access the backup data either from my netbook or miniture media server, both of which run Gentoo
Linux and have ZFS loaded.