Seagate NAS 8TB HDD in 4-Disk RAID Review

Introduction Picking the just the right storage drive for your task isn't always an easy task, there are quite a few options on the market by now when it comes to high-capacity mechanical drives and today I'm taking a closer look at how one of the best performing NAS drives on the market, the Seagate NAS 8TB HDD, performs when set up in a RAID environment. Most NAS devices will by definition run with one or another RAID setup, whether it's 0, 1, 5, 6, or the doubled setups 10, 50, or 60. Running a RAID setup gives that extra bit of safety when it comes to always-online data, but it should never be considered an alternative to backups. The Seagate NAS HDDs are specifically engineered and built for these usage scenarios with a firmware that has been tuned for RAID setups and a general built that allows them to be used in enclosures with up to eight drives. Vibrations can damage your drives and the can also have a direct impact on your drives speed, and the more drives you install close to each other, the more vibrations you'll get. The Seagate NAS HDDs are rated for usage in systems with up to 8 bays which gives you an impressive raw capacity of 64TB. The Dual-plane balance system enhances drive performance in aggressive NAS workloads for better vibration tolerance. The Seagate NAS 8TB drive comes packed with 256MB cache, which is double that of the 6TB model. It uses the default SATA3 6GB/s interface that makes it compatible with pretty much any NAS system. The performance isn't without either as it comes with a rating of 150 IOPS and above and a sustained sequential read performance up to 230MB/s, an exceptional performance for a mechanical drive. That's the specs for a single drive, so it will be interesting to see how well they perform once I RAID them. The average seek read and write latencies are rated to be 8.5ms and 9.5ms, or lower. The whole thing is rounded off with an 180TB per year workload rating, a 1 million hour mean time before failure, and a 3-year warranty. Seagate's firmware, NASWorks, is optimized for use as storage drives and it has been tuned to deliver higher performance, a better reliability, and interoperability with popular NAS enclosures. It also features the RAID Recovery feature that prevents the NAS from having to perform a full RAID rebuild if the RAID degrades. Extended error recovery controls correct data without the need for full drive rebuilds. Feature Highlights 8, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2 and 1TB capacity options Seagate NAS HDDs are built and tested to provide industry-leading performance for small NAS systems. NASWorks technology supports customised error recovery controls, power management and vibration tolerance for optimal performance and reliability with workloads up to 180TB/year workload rate limit (WRL). NAS error recovery controls optimise drive health by helping to ensure drives are not dropped from the NAS and sent into a RAID rebuild. Improved vibration tolerance and emission in multi-drive systems with dual plane balance. Advanced power management supports multiple power profiles for low-power, 24×7 performance. Quiet drive operation enhances the customer experience in living room or office environments. Optional 3-year Rescue recovery service plan protects against data loss from viruses, software issues, or mechanical and electrical breakdowns in a NAS or RAID environment. Specifications The specifications are taken directly from the manufacturers homepage at the time of the review and might as such be subject to possible future changes. Test Procedure I will be creating each possible RAID array through the Intel RAID tool and fully initialize it through the IRST control panel before running each test. I will be running a series of benchmarks with the software mentioned below on each array before destroying it and moving on to the next. I will let each array fully initialise which is a very time-consuming event and a review like this ties up the test bench for more than a week. It is still worth it as we are sure to get the best and most accurate results and thereby a better review of the drives. I'll be using four drives in all the tests except RAID 1 mode that only allows two disks to be used. The SSD with the operating system is also running on a different SATA controller to avoid possible performance impact between the operating system and our benchmark tests. Each of the following pages will display a list of screenshots from each test as well as comparison charts for a quick overview. Test system: Supermicro C7Z97-OCE Intel Xeon E3-1230Lv3 Corsair Vengeance 16GB 1866MHz Kingston HyperX 240GB SSD Sapphire R7 240 2GB be quiet! Dark Power Pro 11 850W Thermaltake Water 3.0 Performer Lian Li PC-T60 We would like to thank our sponsors for supplying us with our test system components that make these reviews possible. I'll use a row of different software applications to gain the broadest spectrum of results and allow for the fairest testing possible. Software used: AIDA64 Engineer Anvil's Storage Utilities AS SSD Benchmark ATTO Disk Benchmark CrystalDiskMark IOMeter AIDA64 Engineer AIDA64 is a streamlined Windows diagnostic and benchmarking software for home users. It provides a wide range of features to assist in overclocking, hardware error diagnosis, stress testing, and sensor monitoring. It has unique capabilities to assess the performance of the processor, system memory, and disk drives and is compatible with most Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also has a disk benchmark tool, and that is the one we'll be using. RAID 0 Performance RAID 1 Performance RAID 5 Performance RAID 10 Performance Anvil's Storage Utilities Anvil's Storage Utilities is a relative new benchmarking utility that has the ability to test mainly hard drives and solid state drives, but also any other form of storage medium that you can throw at it. It is completely free as well, which is a nice thing RAID 0 Performance RAID 1 Performance RAID 5 Performance RAID 10 Performance AS SSD The AS SSD software determines the performance of Solid State Drives (SSD). The tool contains five synthetic and three practice tests. The synthetic tests determine the sequential and random read and write performance of the SSD. These tests are performed without using the operating system caches. In Sequential tests, the program measures the time it takes to read and write a 1 GB file respectively. To give a clearer picture of the drives tested, I've chosen to include all tests. Special the copy test is one that I think is relevant on the consumer level as it gives the user a view To give a clearer picture of the drives tested, I've chosen to include all tests, also the copy test. While it isn't the most static test, I think it is a relevant test in the eyes of consumers, giving them a view into one of the operations they're going to be doing many times. RAID 0 Performance RAID 1 Performance RAID 5 Performance RAID 10 Performance ATTO The ATTO Disk Benchmark is a performance measurement tool is for Windows. It measures storage systems performance with various transfer sizes and test lengths for both reads and writes. It has multiple options available to customize your performance measurement, including queue depth, overlapped I/O and even a comparison mode with the option to run continuously. ATTO can be used to test any manufacturers RAID controllers, storage controllers, host adapters, hard drives and SSD drives so it is a popular tool everywhere. RAID 0 Performance RAID 1 Performance RAID 5 Performance RAID 10 Performance CrystalDiskMark CrystalDiskMark is a small HDD benchmark utility for your hard drive that enables you to rapidly measure sequential and random 4KB/512KB read/write speeds. RAID 0 Performance RAID 1 Performance RAID 5 Performance RAID 10 Performance IOmeter IOMeter is an I/O subsystem measurement and characterization tool for single and clustered systems. It is used as a benchmark and troubleshooting tool and is easily configured to replicate the behavior of many popular applications. One commonly quoted measurement provided by the tool is IOPS. IOMeter allows the configuration of disk parameters such as the ‘Maximum Disk Size’, ‘Starting Disk Sector’ and ‘# of Outstanding I/Os’. This allows a user to configure a test file upon which the ‘Access Specifications’ configure the I/O types to the file. Random Drive Performance Sequential Drive Performance Final Thoughts Pricing At the time of writing, the Seagate NAS HDD 8TB can be found at NewEgg for $348.99, Overclockers UK for £327.95, or through Geizhals for €325.24. Conclusion You should pick the storage drives for your NAS with care and not just take some random cheap drive. After all, these are your precious files and you wouldn't want to lose them. The Seagate NAS 8TB drives would be a perfect choice for this. We already saw a very strong performance in our single-disk review and it was no different when they were put into RAID setups. The double cache and the NAS optimised firmware makes these hard disk drives perform exceptionally well for consumer drives. On top of that, users of these drives will achieve a lower total cost of ownership through less power consumption. You can simply gain more TB per drive and thereby more capacity per watt compared to smaller drives. The drives scaled very well in our setups and we saw really great performance figures with sequential operations going up close to 1GBps. Considering we also get up to 32TB capacity from four drives at the same time, that's seriously impressive. The access times didn't suffer from our RAID setups either and we overall got a strong performance in all tests. Pros Great scaling Great performance Low total cost of ownership, capacity per watt NAS and RAID optimised Optional Seagate Disaster Recovery options available Cons none "I wouldn't think twice whether to get the Seagate NAS 8TB drives or something else. The performance, capacity, and price are things that you simply can't argue with." Thanks to Seagate for providing us with these sample drives