Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

FINAL UPDATE: After exactly 4 years on the clock; one out of two of my 8TB drives in my NAS failed. It gave warnings for 2 weeks by means of increasing amount of bad sectors - then sudden death. Thanks to my Raid, I didn't lose any data. But I also retired the other good 8GB drive as well (which still runs good - zero bad sectors), for a potential non-critical future use in one of our home PCs. Looking back; I certainly received fair return on my money in that 4 years (specially considering this 8TB is a SMR drive which is not targeted to run 24X7 in a NAS environment). So what one does after experiencing Seagate drive failure? That's right; I replaced my drives with new Seagates! But this time I chose bare Seagate Ironwolf NAS drives (after checking many current reviews of bare & external drives). Ironwolfs are CMR drives and designed to play nicely in a NAS environment. They have best reviews and don't really have competition from WD (their Red NAS drives are SMR - never to go that route again). Few words about SMR drives; last couple of years both Seagate and WD initially openly lied about (or tried hiding the truth) for which of their drives are SMR and which aren't. But industry revealed independent tests to prove; so they had to openly confess. At least Seagate markets their CMR drives as CMR drives now. You have to be careful and google to find out if your targeted drive is SMR or CMR. Also much welcome good news for me: when I installed my new Ironwolf drives; below mentioned "cyclical head activity" nuisance of last 4 years came to an instant end! They are as quite as they can be. Being curious, I plugged my retired (good) 8TB SMR drive in to a standalone SATA power adapter (no data connection). When I powered on; there was no cyclical head activity noise when it's just running free (but I'm sure the heads are parked - although the motor is spinning, as there is no SATA data cable connection). So my conclusion (after all that experimental debate below); this SMR drive (at least the early RT17 firmware I had) is employing such extra periodical head activity when accessing data. May be Seagate corrected this on newer firmwares (as this exact 8TB external drive is still being sold today, after 4 years); I have no idea. Lessons learned for me: 1) Never-ever buy another SMR drive, under any usage scenario. Period. 2) I'll not be going thru another shucking adventure. Why? As I checked current high capacity external drive reviews, I noticed quite high failure rate (specially within first few months). Yes, shucking external drives to get bare drive still comes out cheaper. But I won't be gambling by having voided warranty to save few bucks. I was lucky with my below trial that I got 4 years of usage. You might not have the same luck. Just not worth it for me. Now I have years of official warranty with my new Ironwolf drives. Also my approach to NAS usage changed; after seeing all those data breaches within last few years. I do not keep any sensitive data on my NAS any longer (although my Synology is set to restrict WAN access; still I don’t trust it / I don’t risk it). I also don’t keep any backups on my NAS as well for same reason. I started doing all my backups manually to offline few external drives. That way I know that no one can access them other than myself. Did you notice how easily NAS becomes NSA? 😉 Consequently; my storage need for my NAS drives shrunk a lot, as I basically only have my media files and non-sensitive documents on it. As a matter of fact; I switched down from 8TB to 4TB on my new Ironwolf drives. That’s more than enough for my needs at this time. Ask yourself; do you really need greatest & craziest drive capacity for your NAS? --------------------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE-2: After Christopher K.'s feedback I conducted further tests to isolate that cyclical head activity situation. I first unplugged CAT6 cable to my NAS (Synology DiskStation DS213air). Wi-fi is already disabled. So NAS become absolutely stand-alone, away from all external interaction. When you unplug the ethernet cable, it goes thru a busy few minutes with disk activitiy. Then after it calmed down, I noticed that such semi-cyclical head activity is still going on. At that point the only possible intervention to drives can obviously be coming from NAS operating system (DSM 6.1.3-15152 Update 3) and/or these 3 "packages" running on that NAS OS: -Universal Search (can't disable) -File Station (can't disable) -Media Server (can uninstall) So in theory either NAS OS or one of these packages can be "polling" the drives cyclically. Otherwise, such cyclical activity must be coming from drive itself. I checked a bit more online for that ST8000AS0002 drive. Looks like Seagate part no is 1NA17Z and firmware version of my drives is: RT17 . Seagate website informs that; "No Newer Firmware Available / A field update is not available" (I guess they don't want to give users the ability to change firmware - potentially discovering built-in "NSA code"! (as discovered by Kaspersky few years ago)). Since user Christopher K. reported silent NAS operation of his same drives; the chances are that they might have never firmware. Or it could be purely because of NAS OS. I update both OS and packages on my Synology NAS as they become available. So it might be theoretically possible that one such update (which coincided with me installing these new Seagate drives) could be the reason behind such cyclical activity. But I noticed this nuisance immediately after upgrading to these new Seagate drives. So I still reasonably think that it's being caused by the drive itself (whether SMR structure or firmware level). On my test, next I plugged back CAT6 cable to my NAS. So now it's hardwired to my router (Netgear Nighthawk R6700); another potential source of external polling to the drives. Again after few more minutes of "calming down"; already existing activity level of drives didn't change. So the router is not guilty. At that point my hard-wired desktop PCs are off. I turned on one of my Win10 PCs (running Kaspersky Internet Suite); still same activity level on those Seagate drives. So my conclusion is; I still think that these drives (at least the ones I have - with potentially earlier firmware) are not able to "sit quite" in my given NAS. The only absolute proof will be when I upgrade them in the future (it'll be a non-SMR drive). If the new drives will be as quite as my earlier (non-SMR) Seagate drives; then I'll know that the reason was those drives after all... -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- UPDATE: In my NAS; drive heads seek in irregular intervals (about every 5-15 seconds), even there is no user read/write activity going on. Drives might be refreshing their buffers or something. Previous Seagate models (non-SMR type) were not doing that. Other than that extremely audible nuisance, this non-stop mechanical activity might shorten life-span of drives. I'll update if they fail prematurely. I suggest that you avoid this (and any) drive that uses SMR technology. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Inside the unit is a Seagate Archive HDD v2 ST8000AS0002 8TB 5900 RPM 128MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive. I needed the internal drive. This external unit was cheaper than buying the bare drive. Plus I have an extra USB3-to-SATA board with power adapter. This drive uses SMR technology; so it's supposed to be slow (not to be used as system drive - for archive purposes only). I replaced one of my aged NAS drives (also a Seagate 4TB Barracuda ST4000DM000 which reliably served me about 4 years - 24 hrs) with this new ST8000AS0002. Both drives have 5900 rpm speed. New one uses SMR technology, old one does not. New one runs at 100 F temperature (measured by my NAS) - old one at 90 F side-by side in NAS enclosure (fan cooled). I use my NAS strictly with ethernet cable (although it has wi-fi option; it's a joke and I disabled it after trying it once). So with old drives (in parallel writing RAID mode) I was getting 75MB/sec transfer speed. Surprisingly with one new drive (other 4TB still keeps running after 4 years) I still get the same speed. So speed of this 8TB SMR drive is totally acceptable to me. Much more than archiving speed, I can consistently stream HD movie with that 75MB/sec hard-wired ethernet connection. For those who are thinking about doing the same; opening the case is pretty much destructive (read: your warranty for whole unit is void). Interestingly; I checked warranty status for bare internal drive : Seagate web site informs that "the unit was sold as a system component. Please contact your place of purchase for service"... So after all; directly buying an internal drive (and paying a bit more) makes better sense for warranty purposes. I'll update later on about longevity of the new drive.