8TB Seagate drive, faulty or normal?

[Sohaib]

Hi guys, so i am having a bit of a problem right now. I just bought my first 8 TB HDD, its Seagate Archive 8TB HDD, ST8000AS0002.
I have bunch of 4 TB hard drives including western digital and seagate but this my first 8tb. Now i know this drive that i just purchased isn't supposed to be fast as its 5900 RPM but that's fine with me because i won't be accessing it on regular bases. The purpose i bought is to keep all of my videos here in one place.

So i started moving all of my videos from my 4 TB hdd to 8 TB hdd but here is the issue, the transfer is going super slow, it started at 150 MB/s but after a minute or so it dropped and continue to drop to a low 5 yes FIVE MB/s and now its pinging between 50 MB/s to 10 MB/s consistently. I went out and returned after couple of hours to find out only 100 GB of data has been moved in couple hours and the time remaining is showing more then a day. Mind you the data i am moving is not small files but big video files ranging from 5 GB to 50 GB in size with lowest being 3.7 GB. The total data i am moving amounts to around 3.5 TB and it contains a total of 277 files.

I changed the hard drive cage which means a different SATA cable, different power cable and different port but the result is same. It starts above 100 MB/s but eventually drops down to single digits and then keep pinging between 5 MB - 50 MB. I also have 3 4 TB hdd's in my PC so i tried copying data from different drive and result was exactly the same. I also tried to copy data from 1 of my 4 TB hdd to another 4 TB hdd and the result was solid 100 MB/s+.

So finally coming down to point, are these hdd's (8TB Seagate archive) that slow or is something wrong with my drive? I don't hear any clicking sound and temps seem fine. Should i RMA my drive?

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

That sounds like normal behavior when you use the drive in such a fashion that it can't simply write a single, solid stream.

Are you trying to perform more than one copy operation to the disk, or read from it at the same time? If so, don't.

Also, the performance caveat is mostly for writing due to using SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording,) although they can sustain a very good write rate when you use them correctly. They are plenty fast when reading.

 

[Sohaib]

No i am not using it for anything else. Only thing that is being done on the hard drive is file copying from another drive to it.
Transfer is normal for about 15-20 GB then its slow as hell. Same happens when i try to copy something from this drive to another. Normal at start then after 2-3 minutes it goes down to USB 2.0 speeds. I am now preparing the drive for RMA as i have done lot of self tests on it and its obvious the drive is faulty.

It shouldn't read/write at 15 MB/s

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

If you end up replacing the drive with another SMR drive, and it performs similar, it's the usage pattern of the drive that is causing the behavior.

Do you have antivirus / antimalware software that is snooping each file as you try and write them to the disk?

You might fire up Resource Monitor and verify that you're only writing to one file on the drive at a time, and that no files are being read by other processes.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Something else to bear in mind (from Tom's IT Pro article):

"SMR drives cannot perform random write or overwrite operations to the tracks optimized for sequential data. Instead, the DRAM cache captures incoming random write data, sequentializes it, and flushes it to the underlying media. There is also a dedicated section of the disk (rumored to be 20GB on the Seagate drive) that provides a persistent cache for data held in DRAM (it also functions as overprovisioning). Utilizing a limited section of the platter minimizes head movement, so the cache operates at much faster speeds that are suitable for keeping up with the volatile DRAM. The cache section of the disk can be either SMR or PMR (which is faster), but Seagate does not divulge the type of recording used for the cache."

It sounds like you have clogged up the on-disk caching mechanism. Like I said, this is normal, depending on usage, and will likely clear itself up after the drive has had time to commit it's on-disk cache to an SMR track.

Tom's IT Pro review page for Seagate 8 TB Archive HDD

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Your ~ 15 MB/s reads are a result of the drive still performing internal writes from the cache section to the SMR track.

 

[Sohaib]

Ok i don't get it but taking 2 hours to copy only 100 GB of data seems abnormal to me. This drive is BRAND new which means its just formatted and no data on it. I don't have any antivirus in background, not that antivirus will scan video files anyway. The files i am copying are BIG files 5GB+ so they are not 1000 of few KB files to trouble the disk.
At this rate it will take around 70 hours to transfer my 3.5 TB of data, no matter how slow these disks are supposed to be but this simply is not normal. If it is INDEED normal then i don't think its a use able disk. I have given it enough time to see if the data transfer rate goes back to normal speed but it doesn't.
My other 4 TB drives averages around 120 MB/s transfer rate without any hiccups so if there was any antivirus or something in background interfering then it should affect the other drives too. No i am not convinced that taking 2 hours to copy 100 GB of data from different drive is normal being that the files transferring are big files not small system files.

And i have used lots of hard drives in my lifetime to know whats normal or not. Right now my PC has 6 hard drives in it, three 4TB drives, two 2 TB and one 1 TB drive which have OS on it. I move lots of data between drives and it sure as hell don't take this much time. This 8 TB was supposed to replace one of the 2TB drive.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

If all you ever did was initialize the drive, then began a single copy operation of some large video files, I would agree, the drive seems defective. But you mention performing a bunch of self tests, which makes me wonder if you were performing any sort of random writes to the drive. If so, I would assume you would need to give the drive a good long while to get back to normal performance.

What you're experiencing seems consistent with what others have experienced. Here is a great example of somebody who set out to benchmark an 8 TB Archive drive for a YouTube review, and only really proved that, when used incorrectly, you tank performance rather than get an accurate picture of it:

YouTube review of Seagate 8 TB Archive HDD

The reviewer starts with a simple CrystalDiskMark run around 2:24 into the video, and that was enough to cause the drive to exhibit poor performance. At around 3:33 in, the reviewer gives a great example of the ~ 15 MB/s transfer rate you're experiencing and complaining about. When the drive is busy internally, you will get poor performance. It's simply the way it works. SMR drives do not behave the same as PMR drives. Expecting a lower cost SMR drive to perform on par with a higher cost PMR drive is only going to lead to disappointment.

Once the drive has become idle, you will get read speeds over 150 MB/s. Until the drive has become idle, you're just asking the read / write heads to do a lot of thrashing around.

Because of the way things work, you have no way of knowing whether the drive is idle or not. The technology it uses is transparent to the end user, and system it's installed into. Ultimately, if you use the drive as intended, single, sustained, serial writes, you shouldn't run into performance issues.

I can confirm from my own experience with the drives, they have no issues maintaining serial writes of 115 - 130 MB/s for 500+ GB at a time, provided you didn't throw the drive off kilter first by saturating it's write buffer and not giving it a suitable amount of recovery time.

I don't know what the recovery time is, but I wouldn't be too surprised if it was over 30 - 60 minutes.

 

[Sohaib]

Ok i still don't get what's happening.
I got the drive replaced, now i used Macrium Reflect to clone the drive 4 TB drive which was 95% full to this 8 TB archive drive. Process finished in about 7 hours, all good as the write speed was ~150 MB/s mark. No issues here, let's move on.

Now i needed to move about 300 GB from another drive to my new 8TB drive and this time i had to use normal windows file transfer and same thing, started at 150 MB/s and then for the past hour its averaging @ 10 MB/s and been going on for 3 hours and still not finished.

What's the difference between Macrium Reflect clone and windows file copy? They are both doing the exact same thing i.e. copying data from another hard drive to seagate 8 TB archive drive. Ofcourse the disk is not being used for anything else then the current ongoing file transfer.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

No idea. Never used Macrium Reflect. However, it sounds like you've managed to clog the drive's buffer again. I've only ever used Windows Explorer to transfer files to / from Seagate Archive drives and the transfer speeds I have witnessed have been between ~ 80 - 160 MB/s during long writes.

In cloning the drive, did it just copy files, or did it copy other information as well, such as security descriptors, partition information, or file tables?

If all you're doing is straight file copying, I fail to see the need to add extra software to the process. Did the Macrium software perform any random writes?

 

[Sohaib]

Macrium Reflect disk clone is 1:1 copy, as that's what cloning means, its useful usually for system drives to move operating system to different drive but i needed to copy all data from one of my hard drive so i thought why not use clone. I checked speed during cloning from time to time and it was always above 130 MB/s.

Now i don't understand how i am cloging drive's buffer, all i ever did was copying a folder of videos from one of my drive (300 GB) and paste it to my 8 TB archive drive. I am doing nothing else and the process is ongoing for past more then 3 hours. I am either doing something very wrong or that's how the drive is supposed to behave.

EDIT: Forgot to mention but i am using Windows 10 if that even matters to list.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Doubt that Windows 10 is significantly influencing the performance of the drive.

Because you are using Windows 10, you should have the option to pause the current transfer. After 30 - 60 minutes, you can resume the transfer and by then the buffer should have had time to flush.

I do feel there is something in the way you're using the drive, as I've never seen this behavior on over a half-dozen Archive drives.

Give it an hour or two to flush it's buffer after your last transfer finishes, then use Windows Explorer. The biggest variable I see is that you used special cloning software for your transfer. I don't know if the file table or layout differs on the Archive drives, but they do use remapping features such as you find on SSDs to reorganize things in support of the SMR technology which doesn't happen normally in PMR drives. I can only guess that your cloning software, requiring a 1:1 cloning could be a source of potential issues.

 

[Sohaib]

Nah cloning isn't an issue. Yesterday when i got my disk i tried normal file copy and i was having the exact same issue i am having right now. For this reason alone i replaced my drive thinking it was faulty. Turns out it wasn't because this drive is behaving exactly the same.

But the thing is, when i used macrium to clone disk it did at the normal speed all the way from start to finish. I can't even imagine copying 3.5 TB of data in the same fashion i am doing right now as that would take days.

Perhaps something with my mobo? Its an old Asus Maximus VI Hero with 4 generation Core i7 processor. I will try updating bios.

EDIT: No new bios available, the latest bios update is from 2014/09/19 so it can't be a Mobo related issue.

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

I suspect very highly that something you're doing is causing the slowdown. The variables I'm seeing are your cloning process, that you're running Windows 10 (I'm using 8.1 and 7), and I have no idea the partition / format you're starting with. The motherboard BIOS shouldn't matter as the drive uses a standard SATA III interface, unless you have the port misconfigured as an IDE port rather than using AHCI mode.

Since yesterday, I have dumped 6.7+ TB of data to an 8 TB Archive drive, with the lowest transfer appearing to be just over 70 MB/s.

The only steps I ever perform with the archive drives are, install them physically, delete the existing partition from Seagate using Windows 8 disk management, create a single new partition using the default settings, and then let Disk Management perform a quick format. After that, I disable file content indexing.

Data transfers are always via copy operations from various other hard drives, using Windows Explorer.