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
Introduction
Seagate's acquisition of LaCie in 2012 made quite a bit of sense as most of their product lines were complementary in nature. However, they had a bit of an overlap in the NAS market, particularly in the SOHO ARM-based segment. Early last year, we reviewed the LaCie 5big NAS Pro, a desktop form factor x86 NAS with an embedded Linux OS developed in-house by LaCie. With Seagate not having a presence in this space, it was an ideal segment to target with the help of LaCie's expertise. The result of the attempt is the Business Storage 1U rackmount lineup.
The Seagate Business Storage 1U Rackmounts come in 4-bay and 8-bay varieties. The Business Storage lineup also includes 1-4 bay versions based on a Cavium chipset, but the OS running on those is not based on LaCie's NAS OS. There is also a 4-bay Windows Server. The Cavium-chipset based units as well as the Windows Server come in the desktop tower form factor, while the units based on LaCie's OS are all rackmounts.
The specifications of the Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount unit being reviewed today are provided below.
| Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay 32TB Rackmount (STDP32000100) Specifications | |||
| Processor | Intel Celeron G1610T (2C/2T @ 2.3 GHz) | ||
| RAM | 4 GB DDR3 ECC RAM | ||
| Drive Bays | 8x 3.5" SATA 6 Gbps HDD [ Populated with 8x ST4000NM033 Constellation® ES.3 SATA 6Gb/s 4-TB Hard Drives ] | ||
| Network Links | 2x 1 GbE | ||
| USB Slots | 3x USB 2.0 | ||
| eSATA Ports | None | ||
| Maximum Capacity | 8-bays | ||
| VGA / Console / HDMI | VGA | ||
| PSU | Redundant (2x) 250W | ||
| Full Specifications Link | Seagate STDP32000100 Specifications (PDF) | ||
| Suggested Retail Pricing | US $5100 | ||
After taking a brief look at our testbed setup and testing methodology for the unit below, we will move on to the hardware and setup impressions. Following that, we will cover performance in single client scenarios and our usual multi-client tests. The final section will cover rebuild times and power consumption numbers while also providing some closing thoughts.
Testbed Setup and Testing Methodology
Our NAS reviews use either SSDs or hard drives depending on the unit under test. While rackmounts and units equipped with 10GbE capabilities use SSDs, the others use hard drives. Despite being a rackmount, the STDP32000100 was evaluated with the bundled drives because of the vendor's market positioning. Evaluation of NAS performance under both single and multiple client scenarios was done using the SMB / SOHO NAS testbed we described earlier.
| AnandTech NAS Testbed Configuration | |
| Motherboard | Asus Z9PE-D8 WS Dual LGA2011 SSI-EEB |
| CPU | 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630L |
| Coolers | 2 x Dynatron R17 |
| Memory | G.Skill RipjawsZ F3-12800CL10Q2-64GBZL (8x8GB) CAS 10-10-10-30 |
| OS Drive | OCZ Technology Vertex 4 128GB |
| Secondary Drive | OCZ Technology Vertex 4 128GB |
| Tertiary Drive | OCZ RevoDrive Hybrid (1TB HDD + 100GB NAND) |
| Other Drives | 12 x OCZ Technology Vertex 4 64GB (Offline in the Host OS) |
| Network Cards | 6 x Intel ESA I-340 Quad-GbE Port Network Adapter |
| Chassis | SilverStoneTek Raven RV03 |
| PSU | SilverStoneTek Strider Plus Gold Evoluion 850W |
| OS | Windows Server 2008 R2 |
| Network Switch | Netgear ProSafe GSM7352S-200 |
Thank You!
We thank the following companies for helping us out with our NAS testbed:
- Thanks to Intel for the Xeon E5-2630L CPUs and the ESA I-340 quad port network adapters
- Thanks to Asus for the Z9PE-D8 WS dual LGA 2011 workstation motherboard
- Thanks to Dynatron for the R17 coolers
- Thanks to G.Skill for the RipjawsZ 64GB DDR3 DRAM kit
- Thanks to OCZ Technology for the two 128GB Vertex 4 SSDs, twelve 64GB Vertex 4 SSDs and the RevoDrive Hybrid
- Thanks to SilverStone for the Raven RV03 chassis and the 850W Strider Gold Evolution PSU
- Thanks to Netgear for the ProSafe GSM7352S-200 L3 48-port Gigabit Switch with 10 GbE capabilities.
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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. Reply
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? ReplySadrak85 - 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. ReplySadrak85 - 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. ReplySamus - 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 $50. That's all they're worth, apparently.
I love Seagate, but between their load/unload cycle-happy desktop drives that have a pre-determined death, and their ridiculously poor quality SAS drives, I just hope their SSD's are their saving grace, because my how the mighty have fallen from the 7200.7 days. Reply
phoenix_rizzen - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
9U for 50 2.5" drives? Something's not right with that.You can get 24 2.5" drives into a single 2U chassis (all on the front, slotted vertical). So, if you go to 4U, you can get 48 2.4" drives into the front of the chassis, with room on the back for even more.
Supermicro's SC417 4U chassis holds 72 2.5" drives (with motherboard) or 88 (without motherboard).
http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/?chs...
Shoot, you can get 45 full-sized 3.5" drives into a 4U chassis from SuperMicro using the SC416 chassis. 9U for 50 mini-drives is insane! Reply
jasonelmore - Saturday, March 15, 2014 - link
all HDD's have helium Replyddriver - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
LOL, it is almost as fast as a single mechanical drive. At that price - a giant joke. You need that much space with such slow access - this doesn't even qualify for indie professional workstations, much less for the enterprise. With 8 drives in raid 5 you'd think it will perform at least twice as well as it does. ReplyFunBunny2 - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Well, as a short-stroked RAID 10 device, you might be able to get 4TB of SSD speed. With drives of decent reliability, not necessarily the Seagates, you get more TB/$/time than some enterprise SSD. Someone could do the arithmetic? Replyshodanshok - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Mmm, no, SSD speed are too much away.Even only considering rotational delay and entirely discarding seek time (eg: an extemed short-stroked disk), disk access time remain much higher then SSD. A 15k enterprise class drive need ~4ms to complete a platter rotation, with an average rotational delay of ~2ms. Considering that you can not really cancel seek time, the resulting access latency of even short-stroked disk surely is above 5ms.
And 15k drives cost much more that consumer drives.
A simple consumer-level MLC disk (eg: Crucial M500) has a read access latency way lower than 0.05 ms. Write access latency is surely higher, but way better than HD one.
So: SSDs completely eclipse HDDs on the performance front. Moreover, with high capacity (~1TB) with higher-grade consumer level / entry-level enterprise class SSDs with power failure protection (eg: Crucial M500, Intel DC S3500) you can build a powerfull array at reasonable cost. Reply