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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buffhr - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
I can see the merit in a single point of contact, however at 5.1kusd it is overpriced IMO. Sure the disk = roughly50% of the cost but still 2.5k disk-less for a system that does not support SSH and practically has no ecosystem or encryption...Samus - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
I can't believe what a hit encryption has on read performance. 25MB/s opposed to 102MB/sec? Holy...extide - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
It would be a lot better if they used a CPU with AES-NImax1001 - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Look at the CPU. There's your answer.Ammohunt - Thursday, March 20, 2014 - link
I agree $5k buys alot of jbod that you can hang off an exiting server and configure however you want ZFS, tgtd, SMB, CIFS, NFS etc..Haravikk - Friday, March 21, 2014 - link
For such a large investment I'm pretty surprised by the lack of attention to detail here. There is no hardware support for encryption, which is crazy; my ~$250 Synology DS212j has an ARM processor with hardware encryption, so why doesn't a $5000+ machine? Also, 2x gigabit ethernet seems pretty meagre these days when any serious data users will be (or should be) investing in 10 gigabit ethernet at the very least, and while the controllers are pricey it would fit well within the huge premium here.I mean, I'm nearly finished building a DIY storage box; it's not racked (since I'm building it around a tower case), but it has 15 hot-swappable 3.5" hard drive bays. I'm using it for direct attached storage and it's coming in around $800 or so, but I don't think a small form factor motherboard sufficient to run ReadyNAS would push me much higher after swapping out the DAS parts. I dunno, for $5000+ I would think an enterprise oriented product should be able to do a lot better than what I can build myself! Even if I switched everything for enterprise parts I'd still come in under.
tech6 - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
It seems to have become the norm that companies release products with half finished software and expect their customers to be their beta testers. Why would any business in their right mind pay $5K for an unfinished product when there are much better alternatives available?Sadrak85 - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Did a back-of-the-envelope calculation a while back; the 2.5" ones just make more sense if you need maximum storage at the moment. That said, when we have the next gen of HDDs filled with helium and holding 10+ TB apiece, 3.5" all the way.Sadrak85 - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
I eat my words, the 2.5" ones are 9U for 50 drives...which is fewer TB/U, if you can accept the units. This one can make sense after all.Samus - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
I've replaced all our Seagate Constelation.2 drives over the past 3 years with Hitachi's, as they have failed like clockwork in our HP ML380 that came equipped with them.When I get the replacement back from HP, I put a Hitachi in the cage, install it in the server, and put the Constelation on eBay where I usually get $50. That's all they're worth, apparently.
I love Seagate, but between their load/unload cycle-happy desktop drives that have a pre-determined death, and their ridiculously poor quality SAS drives, I just hope their SSD's are their saving grace, because my how the mighty have fallen from the 7200.7 days.