Agreed. Do type-A to type-C adapters exist that have power injection? For example, if you buy a Power Over Ethernet device many come with power injectors in case your switches etc. can't provide it directly, something similar could work here.
Or perhaps a type-C to 2x type-A cable? I've seen those used on some hard drive docks, allowing them to draw extra power from a power USB hub or computer, in cases where one connector doesn't provide enough.
I dunno, it's great to see type-C adoption, but personally I'd say that connectivity is too important for external drives at this transitional stage for there to be only be a single option, especially if the power requirement is going to make many adapters and even some type-C devices insufficient for these drives.
In a lot of ways I'm glad they didn't try a series of capacitors or a super cap, the battery is significantly more flexible in the long run, and should have a long service life (LiPo is at least 5 years if it keeps getting excercise)
Very innovative Seagate. Sometimes you surprise me.
@ddriver: "Yeah, it has only been used to start cars for at least half a century."
I'd like to see someone toting around "portable" HDDs with Lead-Acid start-up batteries. (0_0)
On a serious note, charge pumps, batteries, capacitors, and even super capacitors have been around for a long time. This implementation isn't new either, though it may be a first for USB Type-C and I haven't seen retail products using it up to this point.
Umm, no, LiPo batteries are not used to start cars, lead-acid batteries are. No need for LiPo in a car, lead acid batteries are better for the high current demands of starting an engine plus they are cheaper and the size and weight penalty is not an issue in a vehicle.
Nitpickers - always missing the point. And the point was that if you need extra current to start you use a battery you subsequently charge. What kind of battery depends on the application doh.
Ganesh, any idea if the firmware used in this version is also present in the latest standard Archive models? I tried out an internal 8TB last year and was impressed until a large sequential write slowed to < 10 MB/s and didn't really recover.
I believe Seagate tunes firmware depending on where the drive is going to end up (i.e., firmware on the external drive models will differ from what is offered for archival purposes - the standalone SATA drives).
I will ask Seagate whether it is possible to update the firmware on the CTUs that I received last year. FWIW, the Seagate website says it is not possible to upgrade the firmware on any of the ST8000AS0002 models.
Yes it is. I have 2 archive 8tb from 6 months ago with fw ver AR15 and bought another 2 last week with fw ver AR17, although as ganesh said seagate doesn't provide a way to upgrade the fw to my old ones.
I ran a few quick benches (atto, crystal disk mark, etc) between the 2 fw versions without noticing any differences
Ganesh, About large file transfer slowdown: it might be a Windows quirk. I've noticed it on machines with largish (32GB) amount of memory. Basically, when writing several large files, Windows starts to push next file in queue while previous is still being flushed from cache, resulting in disk trashing. It's not very noticeable on a regular harddrive, but on SMR it is going to be bad. Can you repeat that large file writing test but from Linux? Or pull memory out from you windows machine so it can't cache so much?
It is the same test that works perfectly fine on a large number of other DAS units that I have reviewed [ for example, here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10208/lacie-porsche-... ] - so, I am quite positive the slowdown has got to do with SMR. Btw, ref. caching - the files are transferred from / transferred to a RAM drive so that the aspect of the source disk speed is negated, and we are testing pure external drive performance.
Also, in modern machines, users are definitely going to have large amounts of memory - our testing is as much real-world as it can be :)
Sure, as I said, it's not noticeable (only audible) on regular drives. My point is that the problem is not with SMR alone, but with the way Windows interacts with it. And I'm not disputing test results or they applicability to real world scenarios (although Linux and Mac users might find the drive behaving differently). I'm more interested in finding a good explanation for the phenomenon, hence my cache hypothesis. Other way to check - simply write only one, but humongous file instead of several merely huge ones - If I'm right, there will be no drastic slowdowns (except for usual inner cylinder slump)
What happens 3 years down the lone when the battery can no longer hold any charge? WIll it be easily replaceable? Will seagate still manufacture these batteries or are they gonna do a Motorola and refuse to repair them? What about 10 years down the line. The battery component seems to be a huge risk.
If the lipo does fail at some point, then you RMA the product. If it is out of warranty, then like with any other HDD product, you really have no option. Although, a failed lipo for this device does not necessarily mean you cannot access your data.
Probably the same reason most phones don't come with replaceable batteries anymore. By the time the battery is dead the remaining hardware would be obsolete. That said, I'd be surprised if someone (probably the night shift of the factory where the OEM batteries are made) doesn't start selling gray market replacements on ebay/etc within a few months.
This is an 8TB archive hdd. I would expect it to last for 8-10 years atleast. I have had my current 2TB hdd for 5 years now. This just won't hold up well over time. Once the 2 year warranty expires, anyone who bought this product is going to regret it imho. It really needed to be more modular.
This is one of the things that frustrates me about USB in general.
To me, this drive is ideal for offsite backup. It has much higher capacity than any other bus-powered drive, and bus-powered drives are ideal because you don't have to worry about keeping track of proprietary AC adapters.
But the wide range of USB power delivery options means we'll keep having devices like this, where it's not clear if I can even use it. The fact that the reviewer got it to work on USB 2.0 ports on one motherboard is great. Some USB ports can deliver well above the minimum spec. But there are USB 3.0 ports that only support the 900mA base spec, and I'm guessing they won't power this thing. And the real problem is, there's no way to tell!
You can't just look at the specs either. My ideal use case is to make offsite backups of my Synology NAS. One 8TB drive would be enough to backup all my critical data, and I could stop using multiple 2.5" drives. But I just spent the last 15 minutes looking through Synology's documentation and they don't publish the power output of their USB ports anywhere. Not online, not in the user manuals, nothing. That doesn't mean the ports can only output 900mA, though, it just means they won't tell me (they tend not to publish the finer details on their SOHO/SMB devices).
The USB power delivery spec is a mess. Even if my devices had a Type-C port, that still wouldn't tell me anything. The minimum requirement for Type-C is still 900mA, the 1.5A mode is optional. You can implement USB 3.0 ("USB 3.1 Gen 1") over Type-C, still only deliver 900mA, and claim USB spec compliance.
Type-C should have come with a 1.5A power delivery requirement. And even then there will be variation on how much more power a device can deliver. USB is getting a lot less universal.
I very much agree. I remember with the hype of Type C and USB PD the goal was something like 100W delivered from a Type C host port... I'm guessing the high wattage PD isn't coming anytime soon if these are the kinds of products coming out...
The spec is there, the technology is there, the implementation lacks because manufactures want to be backward compatible. I wish they would begin to move on and drop the backward compatibility. For a time they could offer two types of products. Although, with the USB connector integrated with the drive's PCBA, they would need to manufacture two different HDD's.
The 100w power delivery is for power bricks (to standardize USB C for laptop power bricks). It was never intended to provide 100w from a usb port on the PC
The intention of PDP over USB Type-C is left up to the design/manufacturing teams using it. The USB-IF spec'ed out for a PDP of 100 watts can be implemented in many ways, including from a PC. The USB-IF even outline the use scenario of USB outlets in public places and on transport. Yet, they also illustrate the PD Rule charging a laptop from a USB hub in a monitor.
There is not nearly enough PoE enabled devices in this world for my liking.
I was hoping that with all these ultra books around, that the 25W available in just about every commercial office around the globe, could negate the need for business users to carry their adapters to work etc. You know, trickle charging / supporting battery power.
Probably going to take a long time. In order to hit 8 - 10 TB, "hacks" like SMR or helium-filled drives were necessary. The write heads just can't get any smaller now. HAMR might unlock 16+ TB drives, if they ever manage to get it to the market at a reasonable cost.
Drives connected via SATA have DMA, so they can bypass CPU for data copy and leave CPU free to do other stuff.
As far as I know, USB is incapable of doing DMA (security considerations is one reason for it, look up DMA attack). So any USB storage should have considerably higher CPU usage under heavy IO compared to SATA or SAS or ATA storage.
I forget the name of it, but there's a USB storage mode specifically for this, that basically lets you stream data to the drive without sending each block through the CPU first. Supported in Windows 8 and above by default, I believe, with special drivers needed for Windows 7. Not sure about non-Windows support.
Anandtech did a review of one of the earlier USB thumb drives that supported this showing the results of using bulk transfers over normal USB transfers. And I believe the newer external drives use something similar (SCSI-over-USB or something like that) to the same effect.
Well there's the "turbo mode" that increases the max transaction size for bulk-only transfer from 64K up to 2MB. And then there's UASP (or UAS) which is USB Attached SCSI.
Wow, seriously only 16MB of cache on this thing? Hopefully crystaldiskinfo is wrong here. I would think that for an SMR drive you would need lots of cache to make the performance decent. I wonder if maybe it has additional DRAM for smoothing out the writes a bit. You know some NAND would be great with one of these, have them do like 32-64GB of NAND plus an SMR drive, that could be pretty potent really. DOO ITTT
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41 Comments
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osxandwindows - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
So, this is a buss powered desktop usb 3.0 drive?If I had a macbook with usb C, smh.
ddriver - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
An OPTIONAL power adapter would have been wise for systems which can't provide enough power.Haravikk - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
Agreed. Do type-A to type-C adapters exist that have power injection? For example, if you buy a Power Over Ethernet device many come with power injectors in case your switches etc. can't provide it directly, something similar could work here.Or perhaps a type-C to 2x type-A cable? I've seen those used on some hard drive docks, allowing them to draw extra power from a power USB hub or computer, in cases where one connector doesn't provide enough.
I dunno, it's great to see type-C adoption, but personally I'd say that connectivity is too important for external drives at this transitional stage for there to be only be a single option, especially if the power requirement is going to make many adapters and even some type-C devices insufficient for these drives.
bananaforscale - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
Technically no, since Type C connectors are much newer than USB3.0.ImSpartacus - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
This is kind of neat. The integrated battery is a novel way to overcome design limitations.Samus - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
In a lot of ways I'm glad they didn't try a series of capacitors or a super cap, the battery is significantly more flexible in the long run, and should have a long service life (LiPo is at least 5 years if it keeps getting excercise)Very innovative Seagate. Sometimes you surprise me.
ddriver - Friday, May 20, 2016 - link
Yeah, it has only been used to start cars for at least half a century. Such innovation that the mind truly boggles...BurntMyBacon - Friday, May 20, 2016 - link
@ddriver: "Yeah, it has only been used to start cars for at least half a century."I'd like to see someone toting around "portable" HDDs with Lead-Acid start-up batteries. (0_0)
On a serious note, charge pumps, batteries, capacitors, and even super capacitors have been around for a long time. This implementation isn't new either, though it may be a first for USB Type-C and I haven't seen retail products using it up to this point.
extide - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
Umm, no, LiPo batteries are not used to start cars, lead-acid batteries are. No need for LiPo in a car, lead acid batteries are better for the high current demands of starting an engine plus they are cheaper and the size and weight penalty is not an issue in a vehicle.ddriver - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
Nitpickers - always missing the point. And the point was that if you need extra current to start you use a battery you subsequently charge. What kind of battery depends on the application doh.chekk - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
Ganesh, any idea if the firmware used in this version is also present in the latest standard Archive models? I tried out an internal 8TB last year and was impressed until a large sequential write slowed to < 10 MB/s and didn't really recover.ganeshts - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
I believe Seagate tunes firmware depending on where the drive is going to end up (i.e., firmware on the external drive models will differ from what is offered for archival purposes - the standalone SATA drives).I will ask Seagate whether it is possible to update the firmware on the CTUs that I received last year. FWIW, the Seagate website says it is not possible to upgrade the firmware on any of the ST8000AS0002 models.
eddieobscurant - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
Yes it is. I have 2 archive 8tb from 6 months ago with fw ver AR15 and bought another 2 last week with fw ver AR17, although as ganesh said seagate doesn't provide a way to upgrade the fw to my old ones.I ran a few quick benches (atto, crystal disk mark, etc) between the 2 fw versions without noticing any differences
treecrab - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
Ganesh,About large file transfer slowdown: it might be a Windows quirk. I've noticed it on machines with largish (32GB) amount of memory. Basically, when writing several large files, Windows starts to push next file in queue while previous is still being flushed from cache, resulting in disk trashing. It's not very noticeable on a regular harddrive, but on SMR it is going to be bad. Can you repeat that large file writing test but from Linux? Or pull memory out from you windows machine so it can't cache so much?
ganeshts - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
It is the same test that works perfectly fine on a large number of other DAS units that I have reviewed [ for example, here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/10208/lacie-porsche-... ] - so, I am quite positive the slowdown has got to do with SMR. Btw, ref. caching - the files are transferred from / transferred to a RAM drive so that the aspect of the source disk speed is negated, and we are testing pure external drive performance.Also, in modern machines, users are definitely going to have large amounts of memory - our testing is as much real-world as it can be :)
treecrab - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
Sure, as I said, it's not noticeable (only audible) on regular drives. My point is that the problem is not with SMR alone, but with the way Windows interacts with it. And I'm not disputing test results or they applicability to real world scenarios (although Linux and Mac users might find the drive behaving differently). I'm more interested in finding a good explanation for the phenomenon, hence my cache hypothesis. Other way to check - simply write only one, but humongous file instead of several merely huge ones - If I'm right, there will be no drastic slowdowns (except for usual inner cylinder slump)bananaforscale - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
As far as I know it's even more of a problem on Linux.hlmcompany - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
My use for bus-powered drives requires that they be portable. Unfortunately, this 3.5" drive is not suited for such a purpose.MrSpadge - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
Seagate is not aiming this at replacing every other external drive.adityarjun - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
What happens 3 years down the lone when the battery can no longer hold any charge? WIll it be easily replaceable? Will seagate still manufacture these batteries or are they gonna do a Motorola and refuse to repair them? What about 10 years down the line.The battery component seems to be a huge risk.
hlmcompany - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
If the lipo does fail at some point, then you RMA the product. If it is out of warranty, then like with any other HDD product, you really have no option. Although, a failed lipo for this device does not necessarily mean you cannot access your data.Gunbuster - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
Why not have this use a standard cell like 8650 or CR123A? It would not have been that hard to give it a user accessible battery compartment.DanNeely - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
Probably the same reason most phones don't come with replaceable batteries anymore. By the time the battery is dead the remaining hardware would be obsolete. That said, I'd be surprised if someone (probably the night shift of the factory where the OEM batteries are made) doesn't start selling gray market replacements on ebay/etc within a few months.adityarjun - Friday, May 20, 2016 - link
This is an 8TB archive hdd. I would expect it to last for 8-10 years atleast. I have had my current 2TB hdd for 5 years now.This just won't hold up well over time. Once the 2 year warranty expires, anyone who bought this product is going to regret it imho. It really needed to be more modular.
shelbystripes - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
This is one of the things that frustrates me about USB in general.To me, this drive is ideal for offsite backup. It has much higher capacity than any other bus-powered drive, and bus-powered drives are ideal because you don't have to worry about keeping track of proprietary AC adapters.
But the wide range of USB power delivery options means we'll keep having devices like this, where it's not clear if I can even use it. The fact that the reviewer got it to work on USB 2.0 ports on one motherboard is great. Some USB ports can deliver well above the minimum spec. But there are USB 3.0 ports that only support the 900mA base spec, and I'm guessing they won't power this thing. And the real problem is, there's no way to tell!
You can't just look at the specs either. My ideal use case is to make offsite backups of my Synology NAS. One 8TB drive would be enough to backup all my critical data, and I could stop using multiple 2.5" drives. But I just spent the last 15 minutes looking through Synology's documentation and they don't publish the power output of their USB ports anywhere. Not online, not in the user manuals, nothing. That doesn't mean the ports can only output 900mA, though, it just means they won't tell me (they tend not to publish the finer details on their SOHO/SMB devices).
The USB power delivery spec is a mess. Even if my devices had a Type-C port, that still wouldn't tell me anything. The minimum requirement for Type-C is still 900mA, the 1.5A mode is optional. You can implement USB 3.0 ("USB 3.1 Gen 1") over Type-C, still only deliver 900mA, and claim USB spec compliance.
Type-C should have come with a 1.5A power delivery requirement. And even then there will be variation on how much more power a device can deliver. USB is getting a lot less universal.
cygnus1 - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
I very much agree. I remember with the hype of Type C and USB PD the goal was something like 100W delivered from a Type C host port... I'm guessing the high wattage PD isn't coming anytime soon if these are the kinds of products coming out...hlmcompany - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
The spec is there, the technology is there, the implementation lacks because manufactures want to be backward compatible. I wish they would begin to move on and drop the backward compatibility. For a time they could offer two types of products. Although, with the USB connector integrated with the drive's PCBA, they would need to manufacture two different HDD's.CrimsonFury - Friday, May 20, 2016 - link
The 100w power delivery is for power bricks (to standardize USB C for laptop power bricks). It was never intended to provide 100w from a usb port on the PChlmcompany - Friday, May 20, 2016 - link
The intention of PDP over USB Type-C is left up to the design/manufacturing teams using it. The USB-IF spec'ed out for a PDP of 100 watts can be implemented in many ways, including from a PC. The USB-IF even outline the use scenario of USB outlets in public places and on transport. Yet, they also illustrate the PD Rule charging a laptop from a USB hub in a monitor.Notmyusualid - Thursday, May 19, 2016 - link
There is not nearly enough PoE enabled devices in this world for my liking.I was hoping that with all these ultra books around, that the 25W available in just about every commercial office around the globe, could negate the need for business users to carry their adapters to work etc. You know, trickle charging / supporting battery power.
But I'm hopeful the penny will drop one day.
Michael Bay - Friday, May 20, 2016 - link
Any projections when external hard drives will hit 16Tb? I`m using Seagate`s 8Tb now, and animoo fills it up rather fast.JimmiG - Friday, May 20, 2016 - link
Probably going to take a long time. In order to hit 8 - 10 TB, "hacks" like SMR or helium-filled drives were necessary. The write heads just can't get any smaller now. HAMR might unlock 16+ TB drives, if they ever manage to get it to the market at a reasonable cost.Michael Bay - Friday, May 20, 2016 - link
Okay, so another 8Tb external for me, then.coder111 - Friday, May 20, 2016 - link
Ok, so what about CPU usage?Drives connected via SATA have DMA, so they can bypass CPU for data copy and leave CPU free to do other stuff.
As far as I know, USB is incapable of doing DMA (security considerations is one reason for it, look up DMA attack). So any USB storage should have considerably higher CPU usage under heavy IO compared to SATA or SAS or ATA storage.
phoenix_rizzen - Friday, May 20, 2016 - link
I forget the name of it, but there's a USB storage mode specifically for this, that basically lets you stream data to the drive without sending each block through the CPU first. Supported in Windows 8 and above by default, I believe, with special drivers needed for Windows 7. Not sure about non-Windows support.Anandtech did a review of one of the earlier USB thumb drives that supported this showing the results of using bulk transfers over normal USB transfers. And I believe the newer external drives use something similar (SCSI-over-USB or something like that) to the same effect.
lagittaja - Saturday, May 21, 2016 - link
Well there's the "turbo mode" that increases the max transaction size for bulk-only transfer from 64K up to 2MB.And then there's UASP (or UAS) which is USB Attached SCSI.
extide - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
Yeah there are those modes but they are still not DMA. USB does not do DMA. You can with Thunderbolt, though.extide - Monday, May 23, 2016 - link
Wow, seriously only 16MB of cache on this thing? Hopefully crystaldiskinfo is wrong here. I would think that for an SMR drive you would need lots of cache to make the performance decent. I wonder if maybe it has additional DRAM for smoothing out the writes a bit. You know some NAND would be great with one of these, have them do like 32-64GB of NAND plus an SMR drive, that could be pretty potent really. DOO ITTThumanentity - Tuesday, June 7, 2016 - link
Smr is trash.Mikuni - Sunday, June 12, 2016 - link
"$230" drive = $300 in Europe.Kaaz20 - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
Im trying to remove my drive but need help on how to do so. Is there screws under the circular section on the sides?Thanks in advance