Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay 32TB Rackmount NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on March 14, 2014 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- IT Computing
- Seagate
- Enterprise
Miscellaneous Factors and Final Words
The Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount NAS has many applicable disk configurations (JBOD / RAID-0 / RAID-1 / RAID-5 / RAID-6 / RAID-10). Most users looking for a balance between performance and redundancy are going to choose RAID-5. Hence, we performed all our expansion / rebuild duration testing as well as power consumption recording with the unit configured in RAID-5 mode. The table below presents the average power consumption of the unit as well as time taken for various RAID-related activities.
| Seagate STDP32000100 RAID Expansion and Rebuild / Power Consumption | ||
| Activity | Duration | Avg. Power Consumption |
| Deep Sleep (WOL Supported) | N/A | 7.32 W |
| Idle (Diskless) | N/A | 36.21 W |
| 4TB Single Disk Initialization | N/A | 45.14 W |
| 4TB JBOD to 4TB RAID-1 (1 to 2 Disks) | 11h 42m 49s | 54.41 W |
| 4TB RAID-1 to 8TB RAID-5 (2 to 3 Disks) | 1d 2h 44m 18s | 63.83 W |
| 8TB RAID-5 to 12TB RAID-5 (3 to 4 Disks) | 1d 3h 13m 41s | 74.53 W |
| 28TB RAID-5 (8 Disks) Initialization | 13h 39m 30s | 122.72 W |
| 28TB RAID-5 Rebuild (Replace 1 of 8 Disks) | 18h 56m 40s | 119.47 W |
Coming to the business end of the review, the most striking aspect of the unit is its storage density. Cramming 32TB in a 1U enclosure is an attractive option in many situations. We know that the OS is still a work in progress. Feature-wise, the unit may not be able to compete with the likes of Synology, QNAP, Netgear etc. For example, there is no support for encrypted volumes or extensive third party applications.
Surprisingly, despite the obvious targeting of the unit towards IT departments, there is no SSH access or native encryption support available in the OS right now. However, for enterprise applications where the unit may only be serving a single purpose (say, as a storage server with multiple iSCSI LUNs for use by VMs, or just serving up a fast CIFS share for access from multiple PCs), the unit can turn out to be a very good choice. We have very satisfactory performance numbers even when the unit is being accessed by a large number of clients. In addition, we didn't find any long-term reliability issues with the unit, which is more than what we could say for some of the other NAS units that have been subject to our evaluation. As mentioned earlier, the real allure of the Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount lies in the NAS and disk vendor being one and the same, thereby providing a single point of support for IT departments deploying these units. That said, we look forward to Seagate putting in more work on the NAS OS to achieve feature parity with its competitors.
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lorribot - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Sorry but the comment "Most users looking for a balance between performance and redundancy are going to choose RAID-5" is just plain stupid if you value your data at all. Look at anyone serious in enterprise storage and they will tell you Raid 6 is a must with SATA disks over 1TB. SATA is just pants when it comes to error detection and the likelyhood of one disk failling and then finding a second one fail with previously undetected errors when you try a rebuild is quite high.Rebuild times are often longer, I have seen 3TB drives stretch in to a third day.
So on an 8 disk system you are now looking at only 6 disks and you really want a hot spare so now you are down to just 5 disks and 20TB raw, formated this is going to be down to 19TB. Where has that 32TB storage system gone?
If you are doing SATA drive you need shelves of them, the more the merrier to make any kind of sense in the business world.
Penti - Saturday, March 15, 2014 - link
Audience?I don't quite get who's the target audience for this, surely an rack mount NAS must mean SMB/Enterprise. But can't really see this fit here. Lack of encryption is just one point there, but at this price it surely lacks in many other regards, it has no 10GbE, no raid-controller (rebuild time seems to be ridiculous). Software doesn't really seem up for small enterprises. What is this appliance supposed to be used against? iSCSI is it's main feature but what use is it at this speed? No proper remote management of hardware that costs around 2500 USD? That is using a 42 dollar processor? I don't get this product, what are you suppose to use it for?
ravib123 - Saturday, March 15, 2014 - link
We often use open filer or other linux based NAS/SAN platforms.Looking at this configuration I agree that most with an 8 disk array who are looking for maximum storage space would use RAID5, normally we use more disks and RAID10 for improved performance.
My curiosity is how CPU and Memory bound this thing must be, but I saw no mention of these being limiting factors. The performance is far below most configurations I've used with 8 disks in RAID5 (with a traditional RAID card).
Penti - Saturday, March 15, 2014 - link
The thing is that you get pretty decent hardware at 2000-2500 USD. Say a barebone Intel/Supermicro with IPMI/IPKVM (BMC), some Xeon-processor in the lower ends, AES-NI and all that and a case with hotswap bays and two PSU's. No problem running 10GbE, fiberchannel or 8 disks (you might need an add-on card or two). I would expect them to at least spend more then 500 for CPU, ram and board on appliances in this price range. It's not like the software and case itself is worth 2500 USD, plus whatever markup they have on their drives.SirGCal - Sunday, March 16, 2014 - link
Well, I used retired hardware and built a RAID6 (RAIDZ2) box with 8 drives, 2TB each, with nothing more then a case to hold them and a $41 internal SATA 4-port controller card. Downloaded Ubuntu, installed the ZFS packages, configured the array, and setup monitoring. Now I have a fully functional Linux rig with SSH, etc. and ~ 11,464,525,440 1K blocks. (roughly 11TB usable).I have another 23TB array usable using 4TB drives and an actual, very expensive, 6G, 8 port RAID card. The ZFS rig is right there in performance, even using slower (5400 RPM) drives.
So you can do it as cheap as you like and get more functionality then this box offers. Need multiple NIC, throw em in, need ECC, server boards are just as available. Need U-factor, easy enough. I agree with the others, I don't see the $2k+ justification in cost... Even if they had the 'self encrypting' versions for $400 each, that's $3200, leaving $1900 for the hardware... Eww...
alyarb - Thursday, March 20, 2014 - link
half-assed product. why is it only 30 inches deep? You could fit another row of disks if you use the entire depth of the rack. assuming you have a meter-deep rack of course, but who doesnt?I just want an empty chassis with a backplane for 3 rows of 4 disks. I want to supply the rest of the gear on my own.