Seagate Hard Drives - Before You Buy

so i know you're thinking only an idiot would stack drives on a table like this when they move their arms around as much as i do but you know what i like a challenge so let's do today's video about seagate hard drives and i'm going to leave these drives on here on this table in the hope i don't knock him over i'll see you at the end of the video fingers crossed [Music] hello and welcome back and today we want to do another before you buy and today we want to talk about seagate hard drives now of course we're predominantly going to be talking about network attached storage today but there will be the odd token mention of other brands out there such as the barracuda series because seagate hard drives as a whole have things have really changed in the hardware market over the last few years and once again although we are looking at nas i think it's fair to say that a lot of the changes in buying patterns and the appeal of certain brands appeals to a broader spectrum of just hard drives there and in today's video we're going to talk about that particular change in the market and how seagate has suddenly become a great deal more desirable to drive brands in the last few years we're also going to talk about how the brand has re-jigged its available drives and how they kind of moved the menu so to speak in their portfolio and then we're going to talk about why you should buy seagate drive and in some cases why you shouldn't so first things first seagate hard drives seagate are one of the brands that have been around for quite a long time who are they they were one of the um earliest brands in the world of network of um hard drives it has to be said again when it comes down to hard drives although there are lots of middling brands in between i do think the likes of western digital um seagate toshiba these are the brands the big big big ones that have been around for a decade upon decade they're the ones that almost certainly your first device you ever owned particularly pcs but laptops and home consumer devices as well that have a little hard drive in there like a little tivo box or something all of these devices probably had a hard drive inside that was either a wd toshiba or a seagate and in more recent years and by recent i mean at least the last decade hard drives have changed to a point where much like the cutlery and the drawers of your house they have been retooled and reached towards different directions now on this table right now we have four kinds of hard drive this isn't their full spectrum there's a few that aren't here on the table such as the skyhawk surveillance but we have a barracuda drive here that is predominantly designed for utilization in a single use environment in the likes of desktop pcs or single drive archiving or external drives then we have the exos which is a data center class drive to be utilized in much much larger raid arrays and huge rack mount enclosures in excess of 8 or 12 bays then on this side of the table we have seagate ironwolf and ironwolf pro these are the nas optimized drives with the non-pro being designed for about eight to five to eight bays of storage and the pro series arriving for larger configurations than that how does seagate justify having different hard drives for different utilizations and not make you think what's a bit of a con in it one when they're all the damn saying they're all hard drives get out well nice and simple hard drives much like again the spoons and knives in your drawer are tailored towards different utilizations and because of the research and development has gone into hard drives and the different ways in which these devices are used with some devices being on for days weeks months or years at a time other ones being higher read over right and some being higher right over read the idea is to get the most optimized and best possible experience different drives have been geared towards different ways so going back through the lineup we have first the barracuda there the barracuda has a nice fast spin up spin down it also doesn't really hinge on the idea of having to work with multiple other drives consequently it is a far single use environment that doesn't need to be as open-ended to be um basically the instructions and data given to it the beginning and the end is all on the one disk it's not spread across mobile disks and therefore doesn't have to depend on being on for greater length of time the exos on the other hand is designed to be in larger raid environments that open-ended data that i just mentioned also on top of that these are the sort of drives are going to be on for months or years at a time and need to have not only a decent enough bill to take a punch and the heavy right actions and read i dare say in that larger raid array but with the increased temperatures that are generated with the increased vibration and also the ability to have whatever the reported maximum speed to maintain that speed for years and years and years on end so next we'll move into the nas you might be thinking wait that's that there sounded a lot like nas there surely these the same damn thing in a different color they're really not iron wolf drives on the other hand are the ones designed for nas systems which scale towards so these are the systems large scale rack mounts again we're talking 16 bays and bigger zeons and crazy 10 25 g and even 100 g scenarios these are designed for everything between zero and that that large scale you just mentioned so whether you're looking at the non-pro or pro you are still looking at systems that are designed for smaller back chins of drives again ranging up to about 16 or 24 bay in some cases these are designed again for that balance read write action there but the difference is these aren't designed to hit that peak performance consistently and when these drives are read and written to over a great length of time you will find that the exos will maintain that higher read write for longer over time there's other reasons that the exos has been moved aside into its own separate subcategory to do with interfaces and at the end of the video i'm going to talk to you about when you should switch from pro to exos or when you are on standard nas hard drives which one you should be earning towards so stay tuned for that at the end of the video but then of course you've got skyhawk there's surveillance driving you might be thinking wait these nas is next to you they do surveillance surely you just use nas drives the same damn thing surveillance is different surveillance involves having heavy right action an occasional reading by that i mean you've got one or more multiple cameras and there you go spread my arms around no drives knocked over you have multiple cameras all dotted around your home or business environment constantly sending feeds of footage onto the nazis and then occasionally when you get an alert when you want to check if the postman came when you want to just check the cameras that's when you're going to read that data and at the same time data is still being written to those drives those are drives that are designed like 1995 right five ten percent read something that none of these drives here are geared towards and that's really how seagate refined their range into these different discs so is that the main reason that seagate suddenly jumped ahead of pretty much everyone right now in terms of hard drives no there's a few other things that have to be beared in mind one of them i'm sure you're screaming at the camera right now and i know bit rude of course shingle magnetic recording smi was a hell of a faux pas by wd a couple of years ago there when it first started appearing the idea was that wd red hard drives some of the capacities were using drive manage shingle magnetic recording that is when data is being written to the disks uh traditional drives are pmr and cmr and pmr perpendicular magnetic recording and cmr conventional magnetic recording is when data is being written onto the platters inside the disk one second when data is being written i should have had that ready when data is being written inside that little circle there that little platter i'm trying to make sure the light doesn't go nuts data is written there in circles in even threads all the way through and then that little arm goes across and reads it now these smr drives the wd red released these smaller capacities i think it was between 2 and 6 tb these drives use shingle and that is when instead of all of these tracks on that disc being completely next to each other you know no interference these are slightly overlapped during the read the writing operations and then during moments of standby on the disk the system then takes the time to then put them back into their own tracks it allows an apparel larger capacity and also make sure performance is pretty good on those discs with a larger amount of cash there what's the big problem once you're doing heavy operations on these disks and that's just day-to-day operations or a raid rebuild or raid resync rate you know that sort of stuff these drives didn't have enough time to go to standby and therefore if a disc failed you could be in a situation where multiple discs would fail within the array and they'd all fall over now wd didn't invent shingle magnetic recording they didn't and they are a good brand where did they drop the ball they dropped the ball by not telling anyone that was the problem a lot of people weren't so much angry that wd utilized smr drives because they're not alone seagate have got smr drives their archive drives for example are smr and toshiba has smr drives other brands have smr drives it's not a problem the problem was having smr drives as nas drives and not being very loud about it not telling people and lots of people by reverse engineering of checking the disks went to wd and went uh excuse me you are using smr drives and they weren't getting a clear answer until eventually it all spun out of control there's a real pr disaster now why am i telling you this whole story because all the way through that seagate just kept its head down they weren't using smr drives in their nas series and the ones that did have smr they some of their drivers were even called an smr drive the archives for example the early eight tvs and the result was that seagate just by carrying on and keeping their head down suddenly got very very popular because wd and the pr machine kind of hit a wall a little bit there they are recovering massively from that they've introduced the wd red plus series they've rejigged their entire range they've tried to be a lot more transparent they've renamed or reclassified and displayed a lot of information on their drives but unfortunately the pr damage there is still going to take a while before it gets reversed upon the other thing that seagate did to suddenly leap back into people's attention and gradual more is creative pricing and creative add-ons the add-ons one of which of course i'm going to talk about later on but the creative pricing has led to seagate drives terabyte per terabyte always being more affordable than any other brand and i include toshiba in that as well who have generally been quite um aggressive on their pricing seagate being nas or non-nas drives they are a better price per terabyte overall yes with a lot of their drives they get to the market first which is always useful generally they've arrived with in the last few generations from 12 14 16 18 and even 20 tb arriving on the market before anyone else with that capacity but even then they've still managed to have a price point less than that of western digital slash wd in their respective ranges of um skyhawk i'm sorry um ironwolf versus red or exos versus uh western digital ultra star now those two things the smr related um short um pr disaster for wd and that creative pricing from seagate led to seagate taking a lot more market share than they've ever had before not just in nas but now seagate has kind of achieved an area of stability and achieves an area of notoriety more so than ever before what are they doing with it what have they done with their range what about that re-jigging that i mentioned at the beginning well seagate drives for a long time practically every capacity were from one all the way through to 16 tb you could get a 1 tb in standard drive and a 1 tb in pro drive and it went all the way through 10 12 14 16 tb the pro and the regular drive being nas or otherwise were available they were different prices with between 30 and 50 pounds price difference between them but they were at least there now in the last 9 to 12 months seagate have rejigged their entire portfolio consequently you've end up with at the moment the standard class of drives arriving at between 1 and 12 tb only now these are three year warranty drives they are supporting of nas configurations of up to about eight bays they have an rpm of between 5400 to 7200 in the larger capacities and provided performance of around 108 to 210 megabytes per second all the way through which is still pretty good but what about those larger capacities why aren't they readily available why are there none of the larger capacities on the standard class drives if we look at the pro series we see them arriving starting at 4 tb odd number and going all the way up to 18 tb there now these drives arrive with five years warranty they arrive with support up to 24 bay environments again after that is when you hop onto your exos and then after that they have a workload of 300 tb terabytes written and that's an annual workload that is 120 terabytes higher than the 180 terabytes written per year on the standard class with that they are all 7200 they've all got more cash overall and they have a performance max of between 220 to 260 megabytes per second why is there now very little crossover when before you had pro and non-pro overlapped completely why this nice and simple it's because the larger capacities they need more cash they need this rugged design all the way around they need to basically be the best drive anyway and it's ultimately impossible to make a non-pro version of that drive so they were looking at their portfolio and seeing that the difference between them if you looked at the price it was the same once you went to the larger capacities the difference between pro and non-pro was getting thinner and thinner and thinner and some brands have kind of clipped the wings of some drives which is incredibly unpopular or you could just go right these ones in the middle between 4tb and 12tb you can get those in regular and pro but if you're going bigger than 12 you've got a gopro if you're going less than four you can have regular because there's nothing a pro drive is really going to give you overall in the grand scheme of things so that's why they rejig the portfolio do you did like that do you not like it do let me know in the comments because i think this is another area of contention or there's arguments on both sides now i mentioned services and add-ons earlier and one of the reasons why they became very very popular seagate or almost meteorically in a very short space of time um they were always popular but not the way they are now that is two things it is to do with one um seagate's ironwolf health management system it's an on disk drive health check that if you have a relevant nas system it can access and it's like another few disc checked layers next to your smart tests and stuff and you know to negligible results i think for a lot of people who actually use it i think it does the job but you've got actively and proactively schedule it and look at the results but the other thing that's really really appealing is data recovery services the seagate rescue service which is included in pretty much all of their drives now with a few exceptions in the portfolio that means um i think it's three years data recovery services included with the disk now a number of us use these drives in nas systems in pcs and more and we have them in raids we live in that safety net there in case we lose our drives there we want a few backups in place but these do not protect you from things like data deletion or physical corrupted damage natural disaster stuff like that and all of these drives now arrive with the rescue data recovery services included and of course i've talked about it before we really messed up some seagate drives on purpose hammers and stairs and water and stuff to show that the recovery service could recover data something that would have cost tens of thousands of pounds to do privately and they're including it with their drives that's a big big extra it's not the quickest and the level of service and recovery you know i would uh recommend to go to the tnc's because some of its deletions some of its rollback and if you can show that the destruction of that data is beyond your own fault and within reasonable accepted measures they'll provide that service but still nonetheless that is great to have inclusive data recovery services and again that rescue service is available on third party uh on platforms like amazon and the such and the like as a paid extra per year they are rolling that into the drives and i think that's another key reason um that i think a lot of people have bought sigo drives and certainly a reason why you may want to consider buying them for yourself so let's end it on that final point i talked about before a number of you who may already have seagate iron wolf hard drives inside your nas system maybe you've already got a raid array on your synology or qnap nas and you're thinking of upgrading your system upgrading your drives you know one way or another and you're thinking you want to go for something a bit beefier you're you're moving away from mine wolf drives and certainly you're not going to go for any barracuda or stuff like that and you're coming down to that point where you're looking at exos drives and looking at iron wolf pro drives and you don't know which way to go ultimately you know why you might go pro i've already gone through it the enhanced terabytes annual workload of 300 7200 rpm it's a natural progressive step up from standard but why would you want to skip a skip pro and go straight into xbox what does exos bring to the party really that pro doesn't number one it has a much better consistent and higher read write overall these data center class drives have a higher read write on across their entire capacity than pro but again they maintain that higher number for longer and consistently when in active read write action singularly or in larger raid arrays of course next exos drives also arrive with optional on drive encryption so you can choose whether you want to use a military-grade encryption on these disks internally you do have to pay extra because the exos series is a bit more diverse in its part numbers but you can choose multiple um security map like fips and stuff like that to protect your archive data inside even within the raid array with the nas unlocking the encryption and locking the encryption at power down on top of that exos is available in sas as well as sata architecture indeed there's even that mach 2 2 actuator system we'll talk about in another video very soon but exos drives allow you to open up sas connectivity which again it's just incredible compared with outside double that 12 gigabit with sata being standard six gigabit and the performance threshold is getting better and better and better better on these drives meaning that you can have a sas arranged storage system and take advantage of much much faster drives or at least drives that have a higher capacity that may have been ever so slightly bottlenecked by a traditional sata they're better for larger arrays you've got that consistent read write but one of the main reasons weirdly at the end of this year that people seem to opt for an exos drive over a pro is because they're cheaper what it's true exos drives are actually lower in price terabyte for terabyte than pro series drives even though these don't have data recovery services at the time of recording maybe that changes in the future these drives have you know the pros are really good drives are they worth the extra bit of money if you'd like to afford it then certainly data center class drives are noisier certainly wow they're noisier check out my sound tests from a previous video because they're designed for huge raid arrangements that you'll never give me in close proximity with they have more cash inside and they consume a bit more power but other than that they're still in my opinion practically a better driver than a pro in every single way and with everything going with chia and shortages at the moment we're definitely seeing that the ultrastars the excelsior data center class drives are getting rarer and rarer because people are both buying drives for crypto and the pros because of that price point and the margins um within those crypto currencies being quite quite thin on a return of investment roi the pros and their higher price tag means that they're actually more available right now obviously that'll change whenever you watch this video but still nonetheless it still boggles my brain that exos and data center class drives are lower in price than pros again that level of flexibility when it comes to the interface connection encryption on the drive and just general build quality and robust constant read write mean that an exos drive will often be a very suitable upgrade for the more enterprising user jumping from proshima systems thank you so much for watching i hope you've enjoyed this video i know i have and i love talking about hard drives i've not knocked these drives over yet and the temptation to do it right now at the end of the video is unbearable but i'm not gonna if you enjoyed the video click like if you want to learn more click subscribe and of course if you are looking for the right data storage solution for your home or business needs and need a bit of a helping hand and you don't want to pay for it go to the free advice section at nasa compares its man by myself and eddie the web guy it is completely free there's a donation button if you want to do that that would be lovely we might use affiliate links with some of the retailers but we will tell you in advance and ultimately it is a free service to help you get the right data storage solution you need it might take a second a day or so to get in contact with you because it's only two people two human beings with lives but we will respond to every email thank you so much for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: NASCompares

Views: 36,119

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Id: kjcRUjhGURM

Length: 22min 58sec (1378 seconds)

Published: Sat May 29 2021