Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay 32TB Rackmount NAS Review
by Ganesh T S on March 14, 2014 6:00 AM EST- Posted in
- NAS
- IT Computing
- Seagate
- Enterprise

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:
- Thanks to Intel for the Xeon E5-2630L CPUs and the ESA I-340 quad port network adapters
- Thanks to Asus for the Z9PE-D8 WS dual LGA 2011 workstation motherboard
- Thanks to Dynatron for the R17 coolers
- Thanks to G.Skill for the RipjawsZ 64GB DDR3 DRAM kit
- Thanks to OCZ Technology for the two 128GB Vertex 4 SSDs, twelve 64GB Vertex 4 SSDs and the RevoDrive Hybrid
- Thanks to SilverStone for the Raven RV03 chassis and the 850W Strider Gold Evolution PSU
- Thanks to Netgear for the ProSafe GSM7352S-200 L3 48-port Gigabit Switch with 10 GbE capabilities.
31 Comments
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buffhr - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
I can see the merit in a single point of contact, however at 5.1kusd it is overpriced IMO. Sure the disk = roughly50% of the cost but still 2.5k disk-less for a system that does not support SSH and practically has no ecosystem or encryption... ReplySamus - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
I can't believe what a hit encryption has on read performance. 25MB/s opposed to 102MB/sec? Holy... Replyextide - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
It would be a lot better if they used a CPU with AES-NI Replymax1001 - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Look at the CPU. There's your answer. Replynpz - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Wait, what encryption are you referring to, since this NAS does not support it?I think if it did through software, it would still perform very well. 2.3Ghz Ivy Bridge dual core Celeron would still be able to do AES encryption faster than IO to the mechanical disks. Reply
CadentOrange - Saturday, March 15, 2014 - link
The processor doesn't support AES-NI, hence massive speed hit. http://ark.intel.com/products/71074/Intel-Celeron-... Replysilverblue - Sunday, March 16, 2014 - link
Amusingly, AMD's Jaguar line does. Still, it has a single channel memory interface... Replynpz - Sunday, March 16, 2014 - link
Yes I know. I'm just saying his figures are nowhere to be found in this article and seems to refer to an older Atom instead. I'm sure this CPU would not have much of a performance hit in the NAS if software AES were enabled.See:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1401482/truecrypt-bench...
A Core 2 Duo E4300 can do AES at ~124MB/s Reply
npz - Friday, March 14, 2014 - link
Yeah having no ssh access is huge deal breaker.I speculate a reason is to prevent people from enabling features in Linux that Seagate has disabled, like encryption and volume expansion above 12 TB Reply
Ammohunt - Thursday, March 20, 2014 - link
I agree $5k buys alot of jbod that you can hang off an exiting server and configure however you want ZFS, tgtd, SMB, CIFS, NFS etc.. Reply