8TB HDD Drives

I would advise against using these for media as they are classed as "Archive drives" by Seagate:
This new series of Archive HDDs isn't a general purpose drive however, that duty is aligned with the Enterprise Capacity family. In this case, as the name implies, the drives are intended for use in large-scale data centers where density, power consumption, data integrity and data retrieval are paramount.

See this review http://www.storagereview.com/seagate_archive_hdd_review_8tb and decide for yourself, however it will be interesting to see how these work out and how reliable they are in a JBOD. Wouldn't want to risk it myself

I recently bought an seagate 8TB external hard drive as I found a really good offer on amazon (it was cheaper than 6TB internal drives).
The drive works with the same principle (SMR technology) and I can report that writes are really really slow (USB 1.0 order of magnitude). This has been reported by several people around forums, reviews etc…Let me just say that it took 1 week to write 4TB of data.
For me this drive is fine because I’m using it as backup drive that I plug it in once a week and then I let rsync do the rest of the work during the night. I would be a little bit reluctant to use it as internal drive, unless you have 8TB of data already available so that you can fill it once and then ready only…as ryecoaaron is suggesting.

PS, the read speed is good. I managed 120MB/sec over USB 3.0

JBOD itself should be fine, better use AuFS. Do NOT use them in real RAID (neither soft nor hardware)!

Greetings
David

David, please explain your statement if you don't mind. Thanx

They miss TLER, early tests showed they drop out of raid arrays like shit...

So I highly advise against using them in any raid configuration.

Greetings
David

I suggest the use of pooling technologies like AuFS and then use a snapraid parity.

Greetings
David

I was slow to notice this thread. I have been using this Seagate 8TB as my 2-parity disk in SnapRaid. So far I'm pleasantly surprised. I know it's a little dangerous to draw write speed conclusions from dd'ing to an SMR drive, however I do seem to get better sequential write performance on my Seagate 8TB than my WD Red 4TB.

I have a 7 drive snapshot array (5 data, 2 parity), and depending what has changed in the array, snapraid typically reports between 100MiBs-200MiBs during a sync.

Anyway I guess the point of all this is that for my usage patterns using the SMR drive is no different from the 6 other regular drives in the array and hasn't caused any problems, I would buy another to be a media drive very happily.