Seagate 8TB NAS HDD – Introduction & Data Recovery Solutions

As ordinary computer users, you may not have heard of NAS, let alone NAS hard drive. It's reasonable that you feel confused when NAS or NAS hard drive is involved. Recently, Seagate adds an 8TB model to NAS HDD line and it sets off a heated debate – why 8TB model is used and why choose NAS HDD, instead of normal hard disk. In view of this, we're feeling like offering a relatively comprehensive introduction to Seagate 8TB NAS HDD and its usage.

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Actually, NAS was emerged a few years ago, but unfortunately at that time, it was not so popular and eye-catching. Well, in recent years, with the surge in demand for network storage and the booming of cloud computing and private cloud, NAS made its appearance in numerous fields, such as office automation, medical treatment, education and taxation. Though NAS is not famous enough, it's on the way to becoming more and more popular.

According to statistics, one of the world's biggest HDD manufacturers – Seagate has already provided 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB and 6TB models in NAS HDD line. Now, it announces the 8TB NAS HDD, which then becomes the largest NAS optimized drive on today's hard drive market. The appearance of Seagate 8TB NAS HDD indeed provides high capacity and flexibility for small business, helping them boost quick development.

As we know, the cache and the maximum sustainable transfer rate of this 8TB NAS HDD are respectively 256MB and 216MB/s. It uses the SATA3 interface with a transmission speed of up to 6Gb/s. More impressively, this NAS HDD only makes small noise at work – about 2.6bels. Besides, its power during work, off hours and standby and sleep condition are respectively 9W, 7.2W and merely 0.6W. Yet, what is NAS exactly and what is NAS Hard Drive? We'll explain those things for you at first, and then help you recover data from NAS HDD successfully.

What Is NAS & What Is NAS Hard Drive

NAS, the acronym of Network Attached Storage, is basically the device with data storage function while it is connecting to network. It is a kind of special and private data storage server which is widely used in enterprises (some home users also choose to use this to achieve better data integrity and management). NAS focuses on data itself and makes a complete separation between storage device and server. It is able to manage data intensively so as to release bandwidth, improve performance, reduce total cost and protect investment.

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We have to say that, the cost of NAS is much lower than that of server storage, but its efficiency is much higher than the latter. NAS contains two parts: storage device (such as disk arrays, CD/DVD drives, tape drives or removable storage media) and embedded system software. Cross-platform file sharing can be reached easily with NAS.

Usually, NAS holds its own nodes on a LAN and it allows users to access data on the network without the intervention of the application server. It is regarded as a kind of simplified computer with single function, so it is not as complex as PC in architecture. Keyboard, mouse, screen, sound card, speaker, expansion slot and various connection ports are all not needed in NAS. Instead, only power supply and a few simple control buttons are need, so its appearance is a little bit like household appliances.

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As for the NAS hard drive, it refers to the hard drive which is used on NAS for data storage. Some users may ask – can normal hard drive be used in NAS or do we need to buy special NAS hard drive? The answer to this question is positive: normal hard drive can be used on NAS. However, users had better turn the drive off for 5~10 hours a day for data security reasons. After all, the performance of normal hard drive is not as stable as special NAS hard drive.

Based on this, we suggest users who have high requirement in the working time of NAS choose special hard drive like server hard drive, enterprise-class hard drive or monitoring hard drive as the storage medium in NAS system. And we'd like to alert users that they should not forget about the local data backup, which can save them in dire straits.

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Advantages & Limitations of NAS You Should Know

Advantage 1: NAS is the plug and play product in the real sense. Typically, NAS device supports multiple computer platforms, so users can enter the same document over network protocol support. In this way, NAS device can be used for mixed UNIX/Windows NT LAN without any transformation.

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Advantage 2: the physical location of NAS device is flexible. It can be placed in the Working Group, close to the application server of data center or anywhere else. And it can be connected to network through physical link.

Advantage 3: NAS is able to work normally without the intervention of application server. By allowing users to access data on network, NAS device can greatly reduce the consumption of CPU and significantly improve the performance of network.

Limitation 1: unfortunately, NAS fails to solve a critical issue related to file server – the bandwidth consumption during backup process. Being different from SAN which is responsible for transferring backup data flow out, NAS still uses the network for data backup and recovery. Besides, NAS hand over the storage affairs from parallel SCSI connection to network. That is to say, in addition to handling the normal traffic flow of end users, LAN must also deal with the storage disk requests including backup operation.

Limitation 2: since the data stored in NAS is transmitted by the ordinary data network, they're susceptible to other traffic on the network. The system performance will be severely affected when there're other kinds of large data traffic. Hence, security problems like data leakage can easily be caused.

Limitation 3: NAS storage can only be accessed by files, no direct access to physical data blocks (which is easily seen in ordinary file system) is allowed. Therefore, serious effect will be made to system efficiency in some cases. For example, large databases shouldn't use NAS.

NAS Product Types & Main Application Fields

All the NAS products we can see are generally divided into four types: electrical server, workgroup NAS, medium NAS and large NAS. How to define these types? Please read the following content.

  • Electrical server: this is the low-end product among NAS device series. In fact, electrical server is not the specifically attached storage device, but it provides a storage location for network. It includes no component which owns redundancy and high-performance, so it is relatively cheap. Electrical server plays many roles in a workgroup environment: NAT (Network Address Translation), proxy, DHCP, e-mail, Web server, DNS, firewall and VPN.


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  • Workgroup NAS: the working group-level NAS is particularly suitable for the small and medium-sized companies which have a relatively low storage requirement, generally from a few hundred GB to 1TB. When you upgrade the workgroup NAS to medium NAS, you'll find some improvements in management capability, system complexity and other aspects.

  • Medium NAS: compared to low-end NAS, the medium NAS achieves better scalability and reliability. In the meantime, it owns the advantages that low-end NAS has, such as convenient and dedicated storage space, simple installation process and easy management. However, the cost of medium NAS is obviously higher than that of electrical server and workgroup NAS.

  • Large NAS: for this kind of storage device, the easy scalability, high availability and good redundancy of system are very important. In addition, large NAS must provide good performance, flexible management and proper interaction capacity among heterogeneous network platforms.

We really hope that users will have a good understanding of NAS system and NAS hard drive and know clearly why Seagate 8TB NAS HDD appears and draws so much attention after reading the following 6 main application fields of NAS.

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  • Office automation NAS solution: office automation system (OA) is the focus of government and enterprise information construction and this is inseparable from computer and LAN. When companies use the network to process daily office management and operation, office documents, drawings files, ERP and other enterprise business data and personal information will be produced.

    Therefore, a safe, good cost performance, convenient and easy to manage physical medium is necessary for storing and backing up data within the enterprise, in order to achieve the unified management and safe application of the internal data of the entire enterprise and public institution.

  • Taxation NAS solution: a comprehensive system which integrates business, information, and decision support is required in tax industry. Generally, in the tax industry, business data, daily office documents and data mail system are very important; once data is lost, it will bring much trouble to the daily work of tax collection in the entire region. Therefore, NAS server is advised to be applied to store and back up business data and daily office data.

    In business host, the information stored in database can be backed up to NAS directly by using the incremental data backup function. Business data within the LAN, everyday office documents of the working staff and CD-based data can all be stored on NAS server so that the working staff is able to browse and use those data anytime they want conveniently. NAS helps achieve decentralized data storage and unified management of data & environment system.

  • Advertising NAS solution: the data storage mode of many advertising companies is relatively backward; it is costly and inefficient, resulting in the main problem – poor data security. By adopting NAS to store and backup business data in advertising design industry network, advertising companies can achieve the centralized storage, backup, analysis and sharing of data. According to the different requirements of different data from design research units, they can make full use of existing data and reasonably construct the data storage platform of advertising and design industry.

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    As a result, the transfer speed of data will be greatly increased; much time will be saved; and the work efficiency will be largely improved.

  • Education NAS solution: with the continuous increase of data resources in campus, the physical media on which data are stored need to be equipped with large capacity, high security and fast transfer rate. Only in this way, can the security and fast access of the entire data be ensured.

    Based on a series of problems found in school traditional network application, NAS device should be employed to ease the situation: providing an efficient and low-cost resource application system, offering flexible personal disk space service, providing online data backup environment and protecting resource data effectively.

  • Medical data storage NAS solution: hospital, as the social medical service institution, manages the case files of numerous patients and those files are extremely important, as you can imagine. According to the survey result, the amount of data that a hospital generates for a month is nearly 500GB, and it's obvious that merely computer is not competent in dealing with such large amount of data. Thus, the hospital needs a physical medium that is featured with large capacity, high security, easy management and quick data query characteristics to safely and efficiently store and manage those data. Based on this, NAS is what it needs.

  • Manufacturing NAS solution: for the manufacturing industry, a variety of market data, customer data, transaction history data and community comprehensive data are companies' critical assets & the lifeblood of business operation. Currently, how to protect and make rational use of enterprises' critical data become the key factors in business success.

Therefore, the use of NAS storage approach is appropriate since it enables centralized data storage, backup, analysis and sharing. In this way, existing data can be fully used to meet market needs and improve enterprise competitiveness.

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In summary, NAS has great advantages in the aspect of data management. In some network environments in which data expansion is fast, data security requirement is high and heterogeneous platform is used, NAS can fully reflect its value. In addition, NAS enjoys extremely high performance and low cost, so it is suitable for a variety of application environments, from small sized enterprises to medium and large sized enterprises.

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We have known so many merits of NAS, but we need to face this fact directly: data loss could still happen in NAS every now and then because of attacks, wrong operations or other reasons. As it is introduced in the previous sections, data of great value are often stored in NAS in order to achieve better management, higher security, etc. Once data is lost from NAS, users must do what they can to perform Seagate data recovery.

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Yet, how to recover data from hard disk in NAS? This is a critical question that has been put forwards by lots of NAS users, no matter what they're using as the NAS storage medium – the special NAS hard disk or ordinary hard disk. Considering this, we'll continue to tell users about HDD data recovery service and HDD data recovery service cost.

How to Recover Data from NAS HDD

If users adopted the special NAS hard disk, such as the Seagate 8TB NAS HDD to store data, they don't need to worry about data recovery at all. Why would we say so? That is because usually, the manufacturer of special NAS HDD will provide free HDD data recovery service for a period of time.

For example, the Seagate 8TB NAS HDD is provided with a three-year free data recovery service. However, if the data are lost from NAS after the free HDD data recovery service was expired, users need to pay extra money for finding lost data.

If normal hard disk is used in users' NAS system, they have to finish recovery on their own after data are lost somehow. Thus, the HDD data recovery service cost may be very high in this situation. We mean, if users choose to hire professional recovery agencies to help them recover data from NAS HDD, they need to pay a large sum of money. In addition, users' private data will be put under great danger (since they may be leaked out due to various reasons).

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So, we suggest users to adopt professional data recovery software – MiniTool Power Data Recovery and use it to recover data from NAS HDD in person. This could reduce the possibility of data leakage. And by using the free edition of this powerful recovery software, users are able to get back their needed but lost data according to their actual needs without paying a cent.

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We can see that no matter you choose the special NAS HDD or normal HDD, local data backup won't be a hassle. It may save you from suffering someday and you'll be so glad that you did the backup when you come across data loss.

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