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topenga posted:I finally pulled the trigger on a 418Play so now I'm back to obsessively checking EasyStore prices. Yeah, I think the cheapest they have been is $180-190. The 8tbs have been dipping down to $150 pretty regularly. Where you located Red_Fred?
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Feb 5, 2019 20:02
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EasyStore 8TBs are known to go down to USD$130. 10TBs have inconsistent price data anecdotally and CamelCamelCamel is still down. One the Canadian side of things, I've been searching prices and here's a spreadsheet of the prices deals I can find, calculated by price per terabyte. In short, Seagate Expansion 8TB USB 3.0 3.5'' Desktop External Hard Drive (STEB8000100) for CAD$179.99+tax from Canada Computers is the best deal I can find right now.
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Feb 5, 2019 22:05
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Moey posted:Yeah, I think the cheapest they have been is $180-190. The 8tbs have been dipping down to $150 pretty regularly. I’m outside the US so don’t think that would work. Are regular WD Reds the way to go?
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Feb 5, 2019 22:23
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Red_Fred posted:I’m outside the US so don’t think that would work. Are regular WD Reds the way to go? I can't get the deals or the drives that most people talk about either. Reds are fine and still a reasonable price.
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Feb 5, 2019 22:38
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topenga posted:I finally pulled the trigger on a 418Play so now I'm back to obsessively checking EasyStore prices. $20/TB is a good benchmark, especially for consumer-grade drives, although more desirable ones like Reds are usually more expensive.
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Feb 5, 2019 23:43
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Heners_UK posted:EasyStore 8TBs are known to go down to USD$130. 10TBs have inconsistent price data anecdotally and CamelCamelCamel is still down. Hmm. I might jump on 4 of those and take the drives. Are they decent HDDs inside?
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Feb 6, 2019 01:23
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slidebite posted:Hmm. I might jump on 4 of those and take the drives. Are they decent HDDs inside? Normally white label red drives at this point, people seem to be pretty happy. I have 4 of them and no complaints yet. Another buddy of mine put 8 into his Synology with SHR2 and has not had any issues either.
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Feb 6, 2019 02:46
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I thought the seagates usually had their SMR disks inside, meaning slow write times.
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Feb 6, 2019 16:34
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Rexxed posted:I thought the seagates usually had their SMR disks inside, meaning slow write times. Can I present that as a question? How much difference does that truly make? I've seen horror stories and relative comparisons ("it's slower than other technology" statements), but I could do with a somewhat straight answer.
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Feb 6, 2019 16:55
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Heners_UK posted:Can I present that as a question? How much difference does that truly make? I've seen horror stories and relative comparisons ("it's slower than other technology" statements), but I could do with a somewhat straight answer. I believe that the SMR drive has to rewrite a larger portion of data than a traditional drive if it has data change. That means that writing once and reading back are normal speed, but when data needs to be changed or if the disk gets close to full and you need to write to the available area, its much slower than a traditional drive. I may be wrong about the disks inside those enclosures, on further reading I think Seagate Backup Plus externals have archive drives and the Expansion ones have barracudas, at least based on user reviews from newegg. It's hard to be certain about what's in an enclosure without shucking and there's no guarantee that they all have the same disks, though.
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Feb 6, 2019 17:17
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Rexxed posted:I believe that the SMR drive has to rewrite a larger portion of data than a traditional drive if it has data change. That means that writing once and reading back are normal speed, but when data needs to be changed or if the disk gets close to full and you need to write to the available area, its much slower than a traditional drive. This is correct. In theory, media storage should be a write-once read-many situation, but I don't trust what it would look like long term in a ZFS array. The cost savings don't justify the risk of a pool that is dead slow on writes.
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Feb 6, 2019 17:34
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Rexxed posted:I thought the seagates usually had their SMR disks inside, meaning slow write times. That's likely the case; without even looking up the individual drive models in those enclosures, I can tell you from the ones I have looked up in the past, most if not all of the 6+ TB Seagates have been SMR. Heners_UK posted:Can I present that as a question? How much difference does that truly make? I've seen horror stories and relative comparisons ("it's slower than other technology" statements), but I could do with a somewhat straight answer. It depends on what you're doing with the drive, but if you're using HDDs in a manner that the average consumer should use them nowadays (i.e. backups, media, even games should be fine,) you're not going to notice a difference. The higher densities even mean writes and reads are faster than a less-dense PMR drive. Conversely, if you're using an SMR drive for your OS...then you really shouldn't because SSDs have been a thing for like a decade. Rexxed posted:I believe that the SMR drive has to rewrite a larger portion of data than a traditional drive if it has data change. That means that writing once and reading back are normal speed, but when data needs to be changed or if the disk gets close to full and you need to write to the available area, its much slower than a traditional drive. This is generally true; the tracks overlap so the drive has to re-write all of the surrounding data when something changes, however there are multiple techniques used to mitigate this. First, the tracks are grouped together but have intermittent spacing between groups, so the drive doesn't have to re-write everything if something at the very beginning needs to be changed. Second, there's a ~20 GB PMR buffer area that's used to receive data and help shuffle it around. Third, there's further caching with NAND flash (like an SSHD.) There's likely even more technology involved, but those are the techniques used by Seagate. Note that their 2.5" FireCuda (SSHD) and even the Barracuda (regular HDD,) in 2 TB capacity at least are SMR, so if you've equipped a laptop with a maximum-capacity HDD recently, it's likely to have been one of these, and you may not have even realized it's SMR! IOwnCalculus posted:This is correct. In theory, media storage should be a write-once read-many situation, but I don't trust what it would look like long term in a ZFS array. The cost savings don't justify the risk of a pool that is dead slow on writes. I use a single Seagate Backup Plus 6 TB for my media server (Plex,) it's SMR, and you would never notice the latter. It honestly behaves like a regular drive, and reads/writes are fast (>100 MBps.) Any data shuffling it has to do is invisible to the user. Nevertheless, while SMR is definitely more suited for that type of write-seldom, read-often duty, I'd certainly go with appropriate (NAS/enterprise) drives for the purpose of building a NAS or any kind of array, but these cheaper SMR drives would be perfect for backing up the array.
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Feb 6, 2019 18:16
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Jesus Christ, Best Buy! I ordered a couple of Easystores for delivery yesterday around 2:30pm. They were delivered before 11am today. I'm sorry I ever forsook you, Best Buy, for Fry's so long ago.
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Feb 6, 2019 18:50
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Best Buy unironically owns now
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Feb 6, 2019 19:11
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Heners_UK posted:EasyStore 8TBs are known to go down to USD$130. 10TBs have inconsistent price data anecdotally and CamelCamelCamel is still down. GAH, price up $20 
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Feb 6, 2019 19:56
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Atomizer posted:most if not all of the 6+ TB Seagates have been SMR. Thanks for the detailed run down. Based on this, I'm still considering accepting SMR drives for the upcoming Unraid (i.e. JBOD) array based on that as:
That said, the differences between Seagate Barracudas (likely inside the Expansions) and WD Reds (inside most EasyStores and have been found in Elements) are not entirely out of mind. The Reds are known for long spin up times, low heat and vibration for example. This has given me something to think about as I can reasonably see my usage having no issue with SMR Seagates, but knowledgeable folks are recommending WD Reds for the category of usage I'll fall under. Canadian Hard Drive shopping: At the moment (although I've not looked hard) it looks like you can get White Label Reds in the WD Elements units, the the 8TB of which is CAD$212.60+tax on Amazon.ca, in other words, $26.58/TB.
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Feb 6, 2019 20:05
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Heners_UK posted:
Got one 3 weeks ago. WD80EMAZ Helium drive in mine. They we're down to $189.99. Lowest on amazon.ca was $179.99 late last year.
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Feb 6, 2019 20:39
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jeff8472 posted:They we're down to $189.99. Lowest on amazon.ca was $179.99 late last year. I'd jump at either one of those prices, if they pop up. Hopefully a pattern can be spotted on the price graph. When CamelCamelCamel isn't up I can not use it for weeks at a time... when it's down....
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Feb 6, 2019 21:04
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Heners_UK posted:Can I present that as a question? How much difference does that truly make? I've seen horror stories and relative comparisons ("it's slower than other technology" statements), but I could do with a somewhat straight answer. I have a couple SMR drives in an 8 drive raid 6 volume in a Synology that I use for backed up data, so the only way stuff goes onto it is via rsync. If you watch the rsync, it will copy at normal speeds most of the time (50-100MB/s) but fairly often drop to literally 2-5MB/s for an extended period of time, presumably when it is shuffling a bunch of data around because of the way SMR works. It happens a lot more often if your volume is close to full, and I would estimate that overall the syncs take about twice as long to run after adding the SMR drives.
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Feb 6, 2019 21:32
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Droo posted:I have a couple SMR drives in an 8 drive raid 6 volume in a Synology that I use for backed up data, so the only way stuff goes onto it is via rsync. If you watch the rsync, it will copy at normal speeds most of the time (50-100MB/s) but fairly often drop to literally 2-5MB/s for an extended period of time, presumably when it is shuffling a bunch of data around because of the way SMR works. That is in theory you exhausting your write cache. Which for normal operation isn't going to be an issue. Even doing time machine backups shouldn't hit it that often.
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Feb 6, 2019 22:22
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It's very easy to exceed the write cache on a SMR drive. I have two currently used for backups and writes will plummet. It's not a big deal for my use case, but I imagine a RAID rebuild would really be annoying (or drop a disk depending on the controller or the software).
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Feb 6, 2019 22:27
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I just picked up a DS218+ on sale however now I’m a little confused about what drives to get. Given our earlier discussion I’ll grab a new WD Red however I would like to reuse my current old 1TB external (can take it out) as it currently acts as my backup drive. Would I have to format this existing drive when putting it in the DS218+ with a new (larger) WD Red? I’m looking at getting a 2TB Red, what RAID is best (with the above scenario if possible)? My NAS will be mainly used for backups so RAID 1 seems overkill as I backup to the cloud as well.
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Feb 6, 2019 22:56
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Red_Fred posted:I just picked up a DS218+ on sale however now I’m a little confused about what drives to get. Given our earlier discussion I’ll grab a new WD Red however I would like to reuse my current old 1TB external (can take it out) as it currently acts as my backup drive. Step 1 of adding a disk to a NAS is erasing the entire thing. 2 drive bays means you should only do RAID1. Buy the largest drives you can afford, as you will only ever have 1 disk worth of space.
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Feb 6, 2019 23:14
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H110Hawk posted:That is in theory you exhausting your write cache. Which for normal operation isn't going to be an issue. Even doing time machine backups shouldn't hit it that often. Ignoring write cache, any non-SMR drive (or a SMR on initial write) should be able to handle a lot more than 2-5 MB/sec unless you're murdering it with tons of random writes.
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Feb 7, 2019 00:27
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IOwnCalculus posted:Ignoring write cache, any non-SMR drive (or a SMR on initial write) should be able to handle a lot more than 2-5 MB/sec unless you're murdering it with tons of random writes. It actually depends on if the tracks you are writing overlay other tracks. In other words, it CAN go as low as 2-5MB/s. Upper write speeds on a clear drive are like 40-80MB/s. As soon as a drive is nearly full, the speeds loving tank. I kind of hate my Seagate 8TB drive but I use it as a archival storage so once a month I format the whole motherfucker and send all my backups too it. Formatting and writing is a lot faster than updating files already on there.
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Feb 7, 2019 01:57
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redeyes posted:It actually depends on if the tracks you are writing overlay other tracks. In other words, it CAN go as low as 2-5MB/s. Upper write speeds on a clear drive are like 40-80MB/s. As soon as a drive is nearly full, the speeds loving tank. I kind of hate my Seagate 8TB drive but I use it as a archival storage so once a month I format the whole motherfucker and send all my backups too it. Formatting and writing is a lot faster than updating files already on there. I agree - my point was that the drop to 2-5 MB/s is indicative of SMR-related performance impact, and not the result of just filling up the write cache on a normal disk.
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Feb 7, 2019 04:23
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Heners_UK posted:Thanks for the detailed run down. I could see your use being fine with SMR drives, but did you intend to shuck them and put a bunch in the same enclosure? If so I'd go with Reds or better, as those are the drives that are specifically designed to deal with the environment (vibration, heat, etc.) of having several drives all running simultaneously in the same box. If you were just going to use drives individually, e.g. in their original USB enclosures, then they should work just like you'd expect them to, and that's basically what I use mine for as well. Droo posted:I have a couple SMR drives in an 8 drive raid 6 volume in a Synology that I use for backed up data, so the only way stuff goes onto it is via rsync. If you watch the rsync, it will copy at normal speeds most of the time (50-100MB/s) but fairly often drop to literally 2-5MB/s for an extended period of time, presumably when it is shuffling a bunch of data around because of the way SMR works. redeyes posted:It actually depends on if the tracks you are writing overlay other tracks. In other words, it CAN go as low as 2-5MB/s. Upper write speeds on a clear drive are like 40-80MB/s. As soon as a drive is nearly full, the speeds loving tank. I kind of hate my Seagate 8TB drive but I use it as a archival storage so once a month I format the whole motherfucker and send all my backups too it. Formatting and writing is a lot faster than updating files already on there. When I dump content onto the SMR drive the transfer rate is basically always >100 MBps, although the drive isn't nearly at capacity. I could see these scenarios, updating tons of files, running into the data shuffling roadblock, to be fair. Note that, however, unless you're 100% sure what files are being transferred (i.e., that they're large and contiguous,) you might just be experiencing normal behavior for any HDD; remember random transfers are in the single MB range for any HDD simply due to how they operate. If the drive has to deal with a ton of small files and/or a ton of fragmentation, you're going to see far lower transfer rates than for sequential operations, regardless of recording method. This is what SSDs are good at, and why they're I mean, these are typical benchmark results for an HDD, a [crappy] SSD (and ignore the RAMdisk, this is the first satisfactory image I found to illustrate my point):  Those 4k numbers are going to approach 2 MBps for a good HDD, if you're lucky. It would not surprise me at all if at least some of the low transfer rates you guys are seeing are due to small files and/or fragmentation rather than SMR. I run backups with FreeFileSync to a PMR drive (WD Blue or Green, I think,) and can see exactly what's being transferred at a given moment: the big files transfer at the expected rates (close to the maximum for whichever HDD is the bottleneck, the source or destination one,) and the tiny files slow down the overall job. When using TeraCopy and an HDD is involved, the same behavior is apparent.
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Feb 7, 2019 09:37
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Shucked-from-Elements Reds it is. Now just for a Canadian sale...
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Feb 7, 2019 16:12
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Let me know when you find some. I want 4 myself
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Feb 7, 2019 21:42
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What client software is used with a Synology NAS if you just want to keep some folders on your Windows machine synced? I googled around a bit and it seems CloudStation has fallen out of grace, what are people using in 2019? Just plain Windows backup mechanisms? Can't seem to find a definitive answer.
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Feb 7, 2019 23:15
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I don't have a Synology NAS but I use BitTorrent Sync's free tier with my Windows machines, Android phones and CentOS NAS and it appears to have a Synology app as well.
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Feb 7, 2019 23:23
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What's wrong with CloudStation then?
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Feb 7, 2019 23:38
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Flipperwaldt posted:What's wrong with CloudStation then? That's what I wanna know - apparently there's also Synology Drive now, which kind of can achieve the same thing? The official description text for the Cloud Station Server package even begins with "Check out Synology Drive"... 
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Feb 7, 2019 23:59
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Flipperwaldt posted:What's wrong with CloudStation then? Synology has a pretty awful track record with security. Part of that is just it being hard to keep people up to date, but part of it is they use a ton of OSS stuff that has a lot of common pitfalls, then suggest people open ports on their firewalls. Consumers are terrible security experts. In short, I wouldn't use really anything which requires sync between your Synology and a Synology owned mothership. I don't even know exactly what it is, but based on the name I would think long and hard about how much you value your files and sanity. I use their glorified rsync wrapper for Google Drive and Backblaze B2 and it works great, but again, no ports have to be opened and Synology is ostensibly not in charge of the security of the products there, just the integrity of the files.
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Feb 8, 2019 00:54
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CloudStation is for backing up files from computers on the local network to the nas. You seem to be talking about backing up what's on the nas to somewhere else. The security concerns would be different. Bushfarer: Synology Drive is for real time syncing a local folder to the nas dropbox style. But I think it also facilitates having the files accessible when on the move?
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Feb 8, 2019 01:41
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can confirm shucking WD Elements and EasyStore drives is the best deal going. got two WD80EMAZ (or w/e) white label "Red" drives for like ~$150. why the hell is WD selling the whole external setups for significantly less than the cost of just the bare retail drives? it's such a dumb giveaway for WD. also I've used SyncToy plus Task Scheduler for the past few years, but i'm a low information scrub. I was gonna try CloudStation, but all the security hubbub spooked me. don't want anyone ransomwareing my high-def japanese animes!
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Feb 8, 2019 07:43
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Decreased warranty is the big one.
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Feb 8, 2019 13:22
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G-Prime posted:Decreased warranty is the big one. Bare red drives have a 3 year, and EasyStore drives have a 2 year. The bathtub curve applies really well to hard drives, so you’re probably fine shucking an EasyStore and saving the shell just in case.
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Feb 8, 2019 15:46
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I’ve had two reds shucked from EasyStores fail within 2 months among 11 total drives I’ve bought across two years. One I got failed within 2 days actually. In contrast, I’ve had about 14 different Green drives across 6 years with 3 failures. Zero failures for any of the other manufacturers (Samsung, Toshiba). Not statistically significant but Backblaze sees failures almost never for the HGST and Toshiba drives. I have a single 1 TB WD Black from 2009 I’ve used almost daily that still does great. You can pay more for a better chance of not needing to muck with them during your lifetime of usage basically. I just go with RAID and expect bulk storage to fail one drive a year
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Feb 8, 2019 16:43
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The HGST drives look discontinuted now. NOOOOOOOOooo
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Feb 8, 2019 16:49
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