 Seagate's archive drives. These things are freaking cheap for how much capacity you get. I can actually link my drive cost calculator spreadsheet that I used to make this chart under the video by the way. But when I started looking into picking up some of these drives for our long-term storage NAS, I heard the performance totally sucked. So I asked Seagate to send a few of them over and I went on a mission to figure out if there's a way to mask their performance penalty while still getting the cost benefit to build the cheapest 100 terabyte storage box possible. Well my original concept ended up totally not working. That's a new one, right? But I learned a bunch of interesting stuff in the process and here it is. Cooler Master's MasterCase Maker 5 features their freeform modular system allowing you to customize, adjust, and upgrade. Make it yours at the link in the video description. Now before I can explain why archive drives are so cheap and at the same time why their performance is less than ideal for certain applications, we need a little bit of background. Without getting into too much grimy detail, data is stored on hard drives by arranging the polarity of the tiny magnets that cover the hard disk shaped thing inside called a platter. According to the instructions given by your operating system, a magnetized bit is interpreted as a 1 and a non magnetized bit is interpreted as a 0. So you lay down a few billion ones and zeros in the right order, read them back and boom next thing you know you're playing crisis 3. Okay then so traditionally these little magnets were arranged laying flat in concentric circles on the platter. This is called longitudinal magnetic recording. It's easier, but eventually hard drive manufacturers ran out of room and couldn't increase capacity anymore without making their platter so big that the latency penalty of moving the read and write heads around would be too high. Not to mention that I'm pretty sure that no one wants a 10 terabyte disk in their laptop if it has to be the size of a vinyl freaking record. So the first solution then was perpendicular magnetic recording. Standing those magnets up instead of laying them down. This required more complex read and write heads, the the record needle type arm that moves around and makes that ticking noise whenever your drive is working hard. But has gotten us all the way to 10 terabytes so far with maybe a little bit more headroom left before the magnets again just can't get any smaller. Which is where shingled magnetic recording comes in. Now the read component of the head, remember the record needle thing, is narrower than the write component. So by layering the magnetic tracks half on top of each other like the shingles on a roof, much more data can be stored without moving to more exotic materials to make the magnets smaller or even drastically redesigning the heads. Unfortunately this means that while you can read at pretty much full speed the 8 terabyte archive drives that we used for our test are rated at 190 megabytes per second reads, way more than enough for the gigabit networks that most home and small office users are running, write speeds can be devastatingly slow especially when they're random. You see the write head is so wide that it would actually overwrite both the intended track and the next one over on the drive. So it has to read the data that it's going to accidentally overwrite, store that somewhere else, either in a solid-state cache or in a reserved part of the disk platter somewhere else, organize it and then finally sequentially write back both the data it's supposed to be writing in the first place and that data it had to shuffle. This is called a read modify write and it can be slow as all hell. So let's talk then about my idea. I wanted to use the reasonable read speeds, the low cost and the 24-7 operation ratings of archive drives in one of my LimeTek Unraid systems. I wanted to combine that with the reliability and all-around high performance of enterprise capacity drives to get the best of both worlds. So the way Unraid works is that your data is actually written directly to the individual disks in the array, which is great because in the event of a catastrophic failure, let's say you lose two drives simultaneously, at least anything written to the rest of the drives is still there and an additional drive or two drives acts as a parity disk that lets data from a single or two, depending how many parity disks you have, failed disks be rebuilt in the event of a less catastrophic failure. The problem is that while archive drives seem to be okay as standalone individual disks, the worst use case I could find for them was in parity-protected RAID arrays with their poor random performance being pointed to as an unnecessary risk during a rebuild operation. So the data rebuilding process actually puts more strain than normal on the rest of the drives and so the data across all the disks is in jeopardy until the corrupted or failed drives data has been rebuilt. So now we're 70% of the way through the video and we finally come to my idea. I figured by using archive drives in the array and an enterprise drive for parity and to replace any failed archive drives, I could mask both the poor random write performance and the slow rebuild times of the archive drives. And as you'll see from these performance numbers, it didn't work out that way at all. So my heterogeneous drive mixture configuration had worse performance than both all enterprise capacity drives, which I expected, and worse than a pure archive drive setup, which I suspect is due to the mismatched disk spindle speed. So that's kind of a drag, I guess, but there's some good news here for me anyway. And that is that in an un-RAID environment, I can either settle for 50 megabyte per second write speeds, about half of what a gigabit network can handle, in the default configuration where it spins up only the disk to which it's writing directly and the parity disk to reduce power consumption and disk wear at the cost of performing read, modify, write operations all the time, or if I use their turbo write mode that spins all the disks during access, allowing for much faster reconstruct writes, I can still, even with the cheapest drives I could find that are rated for 24-7 operation, get my 100 megabytes per second since I'm not striping data the way that I would in a more traditional RAID, which to be clear, archive drives still are not recommended for. So thanks for watching, guys. If this video sucked, you know what to do. But if it was awesome, get subscribed, hit that like button, or maybe even check out the link to where to buy the stuff that we featured at Amazon in the video description. I have my full hard drive, like NAS, capacity and price calculator excel sheet down there, which you can, you're more than welcome to try out. Also linked in the description is our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one and our community forum, which you should totally join. Now that you're done doing all that stuff, you're probably wondering what to watch next, so click that little button in the top right corner to check out our video from last year, which inspired a lot of this storage server stuff that I've been doing, where we lost pretty much all of our data temporarily. Or did I ruin the suspense? I don't know.