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Original Link: https://www.anandtech.com/show/10335/seagate-innov8-8tb-buspowered-external-hard-drive-review



Bus-powered storage devices have traditionally been limited by USB 2.0's power delivery specifications.
The 4.5W limit meant that only 2.5" drives (typically with a spindle speed of 5400 RPM) could be placed
behind a USB - SATA bridge. Last month, Seagate introduced the world's first bus-powered desktop hard drive enclosure. The Innov8 8TB external hard drive uses a Seagate Archive HDD and comes with a USB 3.1 Gen 1 Type-C interface. This review looks at the hardware design of the Innov8, followed by a look at some benchmark numbers and performance consistency test results.

Background

Storage devices that are powered over USB have to make sure not to exceed the maximum guaranteed power available through the port. In the case of early USB 2.0 host ports, only the default power profile (2.5W - 5V @ 500mA) was supported. This meant that even 5400 RPM 2.5" drives behind a SATA - USB bridge had to use a second USB cable just for drawing additional power.

USB 3.0 bumped up the default power to 4.5W (5V @ 900mA). Thankfully, even the USB 2.0 ports on various computers started adopting this profile - ensuring that the traditional 2.5" drives in a SATA-to-USB enclosure could operate with just a single cable. USB 3.1 Gen 2 still maintains the default power delivery at 4.5W (5V @ 900mA), but it has a number of additional power delivery profiles that we will touch upon further down in this review.

Desktop hard drives (3.5") have usually had 7200 RPM spindle speeds. This usually placed the power consumption of the drives under load around 10W, with start-up spikes being much higher. However, the advent of hard drives meant for usage in consumer NAS units and the replacement of tapes with hard drives for archive storage has made 5400 RPM-class 3.5" drives an attractive proposition for hard-drive manufacturers.

Seagate introduced the Archive HDD last year specifically for archive storage. The capacity bump was realized using Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) instead of traditional pure Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR) platters. This enables storage densities of up to 1.33TB/platter. Seagate has been using the Archive HDD in the Seagate Backup Plus 8TB External Hard Drive for some time now. The Seagate Innov8 also uses the same drive, albeit with different hardware.

The 8TB Seagate Archive HDD has power numbers ranging from 5W at idle to 7.5W for random reads. This makes it unsuitable for pure bus-powered designs, which is the reason for the Seagate Backup Plus External Hard Drive to come with a separate power adapter. The Innov8 moves to a Type-C interface, and it only bundles a Type-C to Type-C cable - indicating that it is not supposed to be used with a Type-A port.

The Innov8 works with Type-C hosts which advertise Power Delivery of 1.5A or higher. If the host does not advertise 1.5A or greater, the Innov8 will not spin up and will flash an error LED signal.

Given that hard drives have spin-up power requirements that might be much higher than the quoted power numbers (7.5W for random reads in the Archive HDD) in the specifications, and USB ports typically have a hard limit on the power delivery aspect, Seagate's design of the Innov8 is indeed worthy of detailed investigation.

Hardware Design

The Seagate Innov8 packaging is indicative of a premium product - a flip top box with a magnetic catch. Inside the package, we have the main unit - a 208mm x 123.6mm x 36mm aluminum enclosure weighing 1.5 kgs. It has six layers around the edges, as shown in the picture below. The feel in hand is quite solid, and the industrial design is praiseworthy.

The chassis has no visible screws on the outside, and four small rectangular rubber feet on one end is indicative of the side meant to be the base when placing the unit on a desk. The gallery below shows the various aspects of the chassis design and the placement of the USB 3.1 Type-C port.

Accessing the internals of the unit involves prying open the two sides of the chassis along the two middle layers on the side.

Internal Components

Opening up the chassis reveals a full metal shield with two exposed screws at the USB Type-C port end. These anchor the SATA - USB bridge board to the chassis frame. The screws fastening the Archive HDD to the metal shield are hidden by rubber bushings. The gallery below presents some teardown pictures.

Important internal components to note include the 8TB Archive HDD with a SATA interface (ST8000AS0002) having firmware version RT17 and the 12.0 Wh LiPo (lithium polymer) battery supplying 3.8 V with a 3162 mAh rating. Not pictured in the teardown gallery is the ASMedia ASM1153 USB 3.1 Gen 1 - SATA bridge chip.

The LiPo battery helps handle the spin-up power requirements and whenever the drive needs to consume power higher than whatever is delivered by the USB port. Seagate has helpfully created a marketing name for this battery usage technology - 'Ignition Boost'. Note that the drive is only compatible with Type-C ports advertising at least 1.5A (7.5W). So, the battery is not needed most of the time. In addition, since the Archive HDD doesn't need 7.5W throughout, the battery can get charged using the USB bus power at other times.



Direct-Attached Storage Benchmarks

The Seagate Innov8 comes pre-formatted in exFAT. We retained the file system along with the contents on it (setup programs for the Seagate Dashboard and a warranty document PDF) for benchmarking purposes. In order to evaluate the DAS aspect of the unit, we utilized the testbed outlined in the table below to test the performance. One of the USB 3.1 ports enabled by the Intel Alpine Ridge controller was used to connect the unit to the system.

AnandTech DAS Testbed Configuration
Motherboard GIGABYTE Z170X-UD5 TH ATX
CPU Intel Core i5-6600K
Memory G.Skill Ripjaws 4 F4-2133C15-8GRR
32 GB ( 4x 8GB)
DDR4-2133 @ 15-15-15-35
OS Drive Samsung SM951 MZVPV256 NVMe 256 GB
SATA Devices Corsair Neutron XT SSD 480 GB
Intel SSD 730 Series 480 GB
Add-on Card None
Chassis Cooler Master HAF XB EVO
PSU Cooler Master V750 750 W
OS Windows 10 Pro x64
Thanks to Cooler Master, GIGABYTE, G.Skill and Intel for the build components

Our testing methodology for DAS units takes into consideration the usual use-case for such devices. The most common usage scenario is transfer of large amounts of photos and videos to and from the unit. The minor usage scenario is importing files directly off the DAS into a multimedia editing program such as Adobe Photoshop. Prior to taking a look at the real-life benchmarks, we first check what ATTO and CrystalDiskMark have to report for the Seagate Innov8. We see numbers around 200 MBps for sequential transfers, correlating well with Seagate's performance claims.

In order to tackle the first real-life use-case, we created three test folders with the following characteristics:

  • Photos: 15.6 GB collection of 4320 photos (RAW as well as JPEGs) in 61 sub-folders
  • Videos: 16.1 GB collection of 244 videos (MP4 as well as MOVs) in 6 sub-folders
  • BR: 10.7 GB Blu-ray folder structure of the IDT Benchmark Blu-ray (the same that we use in our robocopy tests for NAS systems)
Seagate Innov8 8TB robocopy Benchmarks (MBps)
  Write Bandwidth Read Bandwidth
Photos 41.81 29.22
Videos 76.81 92.11
Blu-ray Folder 100.23 116.91

These numbers show the unpredictable nature of the performance of the drive. It is not only the DRAM cache (that usually delivers predictable changes in performance beyond a certain amount of data), but, also the distributed media cache on the SMR drive that influence the write speeds. Reads are affected quite a bit if they happen to involve data that is currently being subject to 'garbage collection' - i.e, moving from one portion of the drive / cache to a more permanent location in the platters.

For the second use-case, we take advantage of PC Mark 8's storage bench. The storage workload involves games as well as multimedia editing applications. The command line version allows us to cherry-pick storage traces to run on a target drive. We chose the following traces.

  • Adobe Photoshop (Light)
  • Adobe Photoshop (Heavy)
  • Adobe After Effects
  • Adobe Illustrator

Usually, PC Mark 8 reports time to complete the trace, but the detailed log report has the read and write bandwidth figures which we present in our performance graphs. Note that the bandwidth number reported in the results don't involve idle time compression. Results might appear low, but that is part of the workload characteristic. This is not the intended use-case for external hard drives, but the results are just presented here for the sake of completeness.

Seagate Innov8 8TB PCMark8 Storage Benchmarks (MBps)
  Write Bandwidth Read Bandwidth
Adobe Photoshop (Light) 73.13 3.92
Adobe Photoshop (Heavy) 94.87 5.21
Adobe After Effects 74.41 4.10
Adobe Illustrator 115.22 3.91

Seagate explicitly mentions that the Innov8 is not compatible with USB ports delivering less than 7.5W of power. Taking the safe route, they don't advertise compatibility with any Type-A ports. However, we got curious and decided to use a Type-A to Type-C USB 3.1 adapter cable and check with the other USB ports in our DAS testbed.

Surprisingly, even the USB 2.0 ports on the GIGABYTE motherboard in our testbed are able to supply the 7.5W minimum power required by the Innov8.

Our rough benchmarking (CrystalDiskMark only) with the USB 2.0 port shows that sequential transfers have no problems in saturating the USB 2.0 bandwidth.

 



Performance Consistency, Power and Thermal Characteristics

Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) presents a number of challenges when it comes to performance consistency. HDDs featuring shingled recording write new magnetic tracks that overlap part of the previously written tracks. By definition, this slows down write performance since the architecture requires HDDs to rewrite adjacent tracks after any writing operation. The Archive HDD uses drive-managed SMR, and this means that the firmware has been tweaked to ensure optimal performance using caching in the DRAM and even media caches.

In order to show the effect of the firmware on the performance of a SMR drive, let us first take a look at our performance consistency test for the Seagate Archive HDD CTU (clinical trial unit) that Segate provided us last year. That sample had firmware version AR13. As a reminder, our performance consistency test takes the robocopy benchmark described in the previous section and instruments it to record the drive temperature as well as instantaneous transfer rates during the process.

The Archive HDD in the Seagate Innov8 has firmware RT17 and is also behind a USB 3.1 Gen 1 - SATA bridge (unlike the direct SATA connection for the CTU numbers presented above). The performance consistency graph for the Seagate Innov8 is presented below.

Note that some of the issues still remain (such as writes slowing down after a lot of data has been dumped into the drive within a short time span and reads of recently written data being slow). However, they have been mitigated to a large extent. Users with average workloads are unlikely to frequently encounter issues similar to what we saw above, though it is not outside the realms of possibility as shown in the backup process screenshots below. We did confirm that this was not due to varying file sizes, but, do reflect our observations from the robocopy tests in the previous section.

Backups start off around 100 MBps, but slow down to around 50 MBps mid-way

Despite the lack of ventilation for the drive, the contact of the HDD with the metal shield and the aluminum chassis, combined with the low-power nature of the Archive HDD, ensure that the drive keeps reasonable temperatures even in our stress test. The maximum temperature we observed was only 45 C.

Evaluation of the power consumption of the Seagate Innov8 was done using Plugable's USBC-TKEY. Our test procedure and setup are outlined here. We track the power consumed by the drive during the course of the CrystalDiskMark benchmark.

Analyzing the power numbers for the Innov8 is tricky, as the power consumption is monitored at the USB interface. In order to get an additional data point, we also performed the power consumption measurement when processing the AnandTech DAS suite. It includes the PCMark 8 storage bench which involves drive conditioning.

These results show that the drive is subject to much more stress with the DAS suite, with power numbers often spiking upwards of 10W. At idle, the drive can go down to 5W, but, even then, we see spikes up to 6W which might be indicative of housekeeping duties associated with SMR management.

The graphs above also include the power consumed to charge the internal battery. Our experiments show that the Innov8 can take full advantage of ports that can deliver more than 7.5W of power to juice up the internal battery faster. The presence of the battery also ensures that any sudden spike in power requirements can be handled as long as the USB port can deliver 7.5W.



Miscellaneous Aspects and Concluding Remarks

Prior to proceeding to the business end of the review, it is time to take a look at some of the bundled features of the Seagate Innov8. The drive comes with an installer for Seagate Dashboard - an optional management application. The installer can also process the online registration for the unit. The Dashboard program allows users to configure backups, process them, and also restore data from the backups. Select cloud services (Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive) are also available as backup targets.

The Dashboard can also be used to configure the Innov8 - processing drive tests, controlling the LEDs, configuring drive spin-down intervals etc.

The Seagate Innov8 includes 200GB of Microsoft OneDrive cloud storage for two years and Lyve software compatibility for multimedia management and access from any device or location. Seagate's MSRP for the Innov8 is $349. However, we currently see the unit back-ordered at most e-tailers, with availability slated for the first week of June. The pre-order price is also higher than the MSRP mentioned in Seagate's launch PR, with the current Amazon street price being $390.

The combination of power from the in-built battery and the bus power from most Type-C ports should make the Seagate Innov8 compatible with most modern platforms. Ignition Boost seems to be a clever way to tackle the start-up power requirements of hard drives in bus-powered enclosures. However, the longevity of the battery is a bit of a concern, and Seagate provides no concrete numbers except for the 2-year warranty. Another concern is that some Type-C ports actually do not follow the full Type-C specifications - so, if they mistakenly advertise 7.5W, but only support the default power profile (4.5W), it is a hit-or-miss situation when it comes to being able to use the Innov8 with that port. [ Update (Comments from Seagate): Ignition Boost only uses 1% of the battery each time to spin up the drive, and is not used once the drive is actually operating. This should give a much longer lifetime to the internal battery, compared to other mobile devices embedding a battery that we use on a daily basis, like laptop or mobile phones. Also, given that Type-C Power Delivery specifications have the potential to offer up to 100W, we can imagine that in the Future, Innov8 will be less dependent on the battery for spinning up. ]

We are not big fans of shingled magnetic recording (SMR), the technology used in the Archive HDD. The performance is not very predictable, and there is noticeable degradation - particularly for large amounts of data within a small time window, and, for data that is read back within a short time after writing. Despite these limitations, I do agree with Seagate that there are use-cases where this is not a concern at all. For example, continuous back-up of data that only changes by small amounts at a time, and storage of data for archival purposes are not affected. In any case, the firmware on the Archive HDD present in the Innov8 is much more suited for consumer use-cases when compared to what shipped with the original Archvie HDDs last year. As long as SMR can deliver a significant bump in capacity while keeping costs low, I think the technology is worth pursuing.

On the whole, the Seagate Innov8 is a very interesting product from an engineering perspective. We would have liked this to be a modular product with user-replaceable hard drives and batteries. Given that helium drives are also making its way into the consumer market and have excellent power profiles, we are quite sure that SMR-based Archive HDDs are not going to be the only option for this class of products. The Seagate Innov8 does minimize cable clutter in a desktop environment, and many consumers might appreciate that. The industrial design also seems to target the typical LaCie market. We believe that the Innov8 should be marketed under the LaCie brand.

The Seagate Backup Plus 8TB (based on the same HDD, and with the same 200GB OneDrive cloud storage offer) currently sells for $230, while the Innov8 is around $390 on Amazon right now. The WD 8TB My Book external hard drive is priced at $250 and comes with a helium drive that provides more predictable performance, though it doesn't have any cloud storage offers associated with it. Is the significant price premium (more than $150) for the Innov8 worth it for the reduction in cable clutter, a battery inside the unit, aluminum chassis and a more pleasing industrial design? That is for the consumer to decide.

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