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:

Hardware and Setup Impressions
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  • 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!
  • jasonelmore - Saturday, March 15, 2014 - link

    all HDD's have helium
  • ddriver - 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.
  • FunBunny2 - 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?
  • shodanshok - 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.
  • ddriver - Sunday, March 16, 2014 - link

    I think he means sequential speed. You need big storage for backup or highly sequential data like raw audio/video/whatever, you will not put random read/write data on such storage. That much capacity needs high sequential speeds. Even if you store databases on that storage, the frequently accessed sets will be cached, and overall access will be buffered.

    SSD sequential performance today is pretty much limited by the controller speed to about ~530 mb/sec. A 1TB WD raptor drive does over 200 mb/sec in its fastest region, so I imagine that 4 of those would be able to hit SSD speed at tremendously higher capacity and even more so volume to price ratio.
  • shodanshok - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link

    This thing seems too expensive to me. I mean, if the custom linux based OS has the limitations explained in the (very nice!) article, it is better to use a general purpose distro and simply manage all via LVM. Or even use a storage-centric distribution (eg: freenas, unraid) and simply buy a general-purpose PC/server with many disks...
  • M/2 - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link

    $5100 ??? I could buy a Mac mini or a Mac Pro and a Promise2 RAID for less than that! ....and have Gigabit speeds
  • azazel1024 - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link

    I have a hard time wrapping my head around the price.

    Other than the ECC RAM, that is VERY close to my server setup (same CPU for example). Except mine also has a couple of USB3 ports, twice the USB 2 ports, a third GbE NIC (the onboard) and double the RAM.

    Well...it can't take 8 drives without an add on card, as it only has 6 ports...but that isn't too expensive.

    Total cost of building...less than $300.

    I can't fathom basically $300 of equipment being upsold for 10x the price! Even an upsale on the drives in it doesn't seem justified to get it in to that range of price.

    Heck, you could get a RAID card and do 7 drives in RAID5/6 for redundancy and use commercial 4TB drives with an SSD as a cache drive and a REALLY nice RAID card in to my system, and you'd probably come out at less than half the price and probably with better performance.

    I get building your own is almost always cheaper, but a $3000 discount is just a we bit cheaper on a $5000 hardware price tag, official support or no official support.
  • azazel1024 - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link

    I might also add, looking at the power consumption figures, with my system being near identical, other than lack of ECC memory, but more RAM, more networking connectivity and WITH disks in it, mine consumes 14w less at idle (21w idle). The RAID rebuild figures on 1-2 disks and 2-3 is also a fair amount lower on my server, but more than 10w difference (mine has 2x2TB RAID0 right now and a 60GB SSD as boot drive).

    Also WAY more networking performance. I don't know if the OS doesn't support SMB3.0, or if Anandtech isn't running any network testing with SMB3.0 utilized, but with Windows 8 on my server, I am pushing 2x1GbE to the max, or at least I was when my desktop RAID array was less full (need new array, 80% utilized on my desktop right now as it is only 2x1TB RAID0).

    Even looking at some of the below GbE saturation benchmarks, I am pushing a fair amount more data over my links than the Seagate NAS here is.

    With better disks in my server and desktop I could easily patch in the 3rd GbE NIC in the machine to push up over 240MB/sec over the links to the limit of what the drives can do. I realize a lot of SOHO/SMB implementations are about concurrent users and less about maximum throughput, but the beauty of SMB3.0 and SMB Multichannel is...it does both. No limits on per link speed, you can saturate all of the links for a single user or push multiple users through too.

    I've done RAM disk testing with 3 links enabled and SMB Multichannel enabled and saw duplex 332MB/sec Rx AND Tx between my server and desktop. I just don't have the current array to support that, so I leave only the Intel NICs enabled and leave the on-board NICs on the machines disabled.

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