Seagate NAS 8TB (ST8000VN0002) Hard Disk Drive Review

Introduction Just as you wouldn't use a low-end graphics card for high-end usage, you shouldn't use the wrong hard disk drive in your storage system either. There is a reason for every product and you should always pick the one suited for the task at hand, especially when you deal with your storage. Today I'm taking a closer look at Seagate's impressive 8TB NAS HDD and we will take a look at how well it performs. As said, when you pick your storage, you need to pick the right one for the task and not just grab anything you can find. This is particularly important when we talk about systems that have to run continuously and in environments with a lot of drives closely packed together. The Seagate NAS HDD goes beyond the standard desktop drives in this regards as it is built exactly for these scenarios. 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. The pure capacity is pretty nice too considering the default 3.5-inch form factor and it has an areal density of 1333Gb per square inch. 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. The great performance comes from Seagate's years of experience that the put into the hardware and also the firmware that controls the drive. 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, and it has the RAID Recovery feature that prevents the NAS from a full RAID rebuild if the RAID degrades. Extended error recovery controls correct data without the need for full drive rebuilds. Performance isn't everything, but as we've seen above, that part is well covered. There are two further factors that need to be considered before you decide which drives to use: Acoustics and power consumption. A drive that consumes a lot of power can quickly drive up the total cost of ownership and it's also bad for the environment. The Seagate NAS 8TB drive has an average power consumption of 9W during active operations and an idle power consumption of 7.2W. When in sleep or standby mode, the drives will consume as little as 0.6W. The 8TB NAS HDD doesn't make much noise either and is rated for just 2.6 bels during operation and 2.5 bels when idle. Seagate also offers the optional +Rescue Data Recovery Services for extra peace of mind. With this extra service, Seagate has your back and can recover the data from a possible failed drive. Whether the error is due to mechanical failure or accidental damage, most data can be recovered when done right. It is a fast and easy recovery process where your data can be restored in 15 days or less. This is also a field that Seagate is very successful in with an approximately 90% success rate in data recovery. So if you need drives for backup and disaster recovery, multimedia server and storage, file and print server sharing, archival, remote access, virtualization, or a private cloud storage, then this might be just the right drive for you. 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 lowpower, 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 Package and Accessories Test Procedure & Specifications Testing a mechanical hard drive's performance is pretty straightforward and there isn't much to say tell in this section. I will be testing the drive that in this case is the Seagate NAS 8TB drive in a wide a variety of applications to gather as many tests results as possible. In return, it will hopefully allow you to find just the right comparison so you are well equipped with knowledge when you decide what you next storage drive should be. 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 Software used: AIDA64 Storage Benchmark Anvil's Storage Utilities AS SSD Benchmark ATTO Benchmark CrystalDiskMark HD Tach IOMeter PCMark 8 Storage Benchmark Each of the following pages will contain the benchmark screenshots as well as charts comparing the drive to similar drives previously tested. 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. Linear Performance The Linear Read and Write tests measure the sequential performance by reading or writing all sectors without skipping any. It gives, as the name says, a linear view on the drives overall performance from start to end. Random Performance The Random Read and Write tests measure the random performance by reading or writing variable-sized data blocks at random locations on the surface of the drive. The Random tests are actually a combination of both speed and access times as it moves the position before each new operation. Access Times The Access time tests are designed to measure the data access performance by reading or writing small 0.5KB data blocks at random locations on the drive surface. Drive Comparison 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 Compressible Data Incompressible Data Drive Analysis Drive Comparison 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. Compression Drive Analysis Drive Comparison 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. Drive Analysis Drive Comparison 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. Drive Analysis Drive Comparison HD Tach HD Tach is a program that tests the sequential read, random access and interface burst speeds of the attached storage device (hard drive, flash drive, removable drive etc.). Drive technologies such as SCSI, IDE/ATA, IEEE 1394, USB, SATA, and RAID are all supported. Version 3.0.4.0 is sadly the final version and the software has reached its end-of-life support. It's still a nifty benchmarking tool and it can't hurt to include it in our tests. Quick test Long test Drive Comparison PCMark 8 PCMark 8 Storage benchmark is used test the performance of SSDs, HDDs, and hybrid drives with traces recorded from Adobe Creative Suite, Microsoft Office and a selection of popular games. You can test any recognized storage device, including local external drives. Unlike synthetic storage tests, the PCMark 8 Storage benchmark highlights real-world performance differences between storage devices. Yes, I know that the Seagate NAS HDD isn't designed to be worked in a desktop environment where these apps and games are run, but I'll still include it for the sake of comparison. Drive Comparison 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. Sequential Performance Random 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 Seagate created another magnificent drive and the NAS HDD with 8TB capacity impressed us in all the benchmarks and taking the lead in almost all of them. It does cost a little bit more than competing 6TB drives, but considering the extra 2TB capacity in the same form factor and being as new as it is, it is a more than fair price. There isn't much to say about the looks or form factor. It is a 3.5-inch hard disk drive with a default design and a label on the top. However, what you don't see on the inside is what matters. Seagate doubled up on the available cache and the drive features 256MB. That is without a doubt part of the reason that the drive performs as well as it does. The increased capacity per platter is also impressive, although not that new altogether. We've seen this size drives in the enterprise sector for some time. But it is very nice to see them enter the consumer market as well. With 8TB per drive, you get the same raw capacity with two drives as you did with four just a few years ago, or 8 drives going back a little further. That's something that will allow you to save on the NAS budget and get one with fewer bays. The high-capacity also reduces your overall power consumption, and the Seagate NAS 8TB drive doesn't consume much to begin with. The added anti-vibration techniques allow the drives to be used in enclosures with up to 8 drives without having a negative effect on the drives health and performance. The firmware inside the controller has also been specially tuned for the best NAS operation. Another bonus is the RAID recovery feature that helps to rebuild drive arrays much faster. A high Total Bytes Written rating and a 3-year warranty further show us that we have a great drive at our hands. Optionally, users can also purchase the extended service where Seagate steps in and recovers your data should a drive or array fail. Pros Great performance Silent operation Low power consumption Suited for up to 8-bays 8TB Capacity Cons none "The Seagate NAS HDD 8TB is without a doubt the best storage drive that we have tested to date. It has a solid performance while staying inaudible even during operation." Thank You Seagate for providing us with this sample