Toshiba’s N300 NAS Hard Drive offers unprecedented reliability for NAS and other high-performance storage systems. It is optimized to meet the reliability, endurance, performance and scalability requirements of 24-hour x 7-day high-capacity storage for personal, home office and small business use. The N300 is available in capacities of up to 10 TB. NAS systems in small businesses or creative environments often need to be accessed by several users, at different locations, simultaneously. Therefore today's NAS drives must deliver high data transfer rates and simultaneous upload and download 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Offering high reliability and scalability, N300 drives achieve a max. 180 TB/year workload factor, up to 3 times more than convenient desktop hard drives. Temperature control technology, through the automatic adjustment of rotational speed, prevents the build up of heat during demanding operations resulting in sustained drive performance and long-term reliability. Also, the use of high-endurance components is one of the reasons that the N300 Series offers better durability than other conventional hard disk drives.
Toshiba’s N300 NAS Hard Drive offers unprecedented reliability for NAS and other high-performance storage systems. It is optimized to meet the reliability, endurance, performance and scalability requirements of 24-hour x 7-day high-capacity storage for personal, home office and small business use. The N300 is available in capacities of up to 10 TB. NAS systems in small businesses or creative environments often need to be accessed by several users, at different locations, simultaneously. Therefore today's NAS drives must deliver high data transfer rates and simultaneous upload and download 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Offering high reliability and scalability, N300 drives achieve a max. 180 TB/year workload factor, up to 3 times more than convenient desktop hard drives. Temperature control technology, through the automatic adjustment of rotational speed, prevents the build up of heat during demanding operations resulting in sustained drive performance and long-term reliability. Also, the use of high-endurance components is one of the reasons that the N300 Series offers better durability than other conventional hard disk drives.
Hard Drive Toshiba HDWG11AEZSTA 10 TB
Toshiba’s N300 NAS Hard Drive offers unprecedented reliability for NAS and other high-performance storage systems. It is optimized to meet the reliability, endurance, performance and scalability requirements of 24-hour x 7-day high-capacity storage for personal, home office and small business use. The N300 is available in capacities of up to 10 TB. NAS systems in small businesses or creative environments often need to be accessed by several users, at different locations, simultaneously. Therefore today's NAS drives must deliver high data transfer rates and simultaneous upload and download 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Offering high reliability and scalability, N300 drives achieve a max. 180 TB/year workload factor, up to 3 times more than convenient desktop hard drives. Temperature control technology, through the automatic adjustment of rotational speed, prevents the build up of heat during demanding operations resulting in sustained drive performance and long-term reliability. Also, the use of high-endurance components is one of the reasons that the N300 Series offers better durability than other conventional hard disk drives.
Toshiba’s N300 NAS Hard Drive offers unprecedented reliability for NAS and other high-performance storage systems. It is optimized to meet the reliability, endurance, performance and scalability requirements of 24-hour x 7-day high-capacity storage for personal, home office and small business use. The N300 is available in capacities of up to 10 TB. NAS systems in small businesses or creative environments often need to be accessed by several users, at different locations, simultaneously. Therefore today's NAS drives must deliver high data transfer rates and simultaneous upload and download 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Offering high reliability and scalability, N300 drives achieve a max. 180 TB/year workload factor, up to 3 times more than convenient desktop hard drives. Temperature control technology, through the automatic adjustment of rotational speed, prevents the build up of heat during demanding operations resulting in sustained drive performance and long-term reliability. Also, the use of high-endurance components is one of the reasons that the N300 Series offers better durability than other conventional hard disk drives.
originally posted on neweggbusiness.com
I got this drive for media storage. It only has about 700 gigs on it and the read speeds have gotten so low that it has rendered it practically useless. No, my sata lanes are not throttled; I can hook up a 1tb WD on the same port/cable and get over 200 mb/s every time, and I have tried hooking the Toshiba up to every other sata port I have on 3 separate pc's as well as my friend's pc, none of which have changed the read speeds. Eventually I decided to short stroke this hdd into 3 partitions as a last resort hail mary before sending it in for warranty. That has gotten my first partition of 600gb to read/write around 100 mb/s with the other two 1.5tb partitions severely degrading in performance the closer it gets to the platter's middle. It's usable now anyway, that's ... MoreI got this drive for media storage. It only has about 700 gigs on it and the read speeds have gotten so low that it has rendered it practically useless. No, my sata lanes are not throttled; I can hook up a 1tb WD on the same port/cable and get over 200 mb/s every time, and I have tried hooking the Toshiba up to every other sata port I have on 3 separate pc's as well as my friend's pc, none of which have changed the read speeds. Eventually I decided to short stroke this hdd into 3 partitions as a last resort hail mary before sending it in for warranty. That has gotten my first partition of 600gb to read/write around 100 mb/s with the other two 1.5tb partitions severely degrading in performance the closer it gets to the platter's middle. It's usable now anyway, that's about the best I can say for it. The first 600 gigs benchmark at 180 mb/s but even when it's short stroked I still get nowhere near those speeds, and even at it's best performance on the short stroke it is still 60 mb/s away from advertised speeds. I have only ever used Western Digital hdd's over my 30+ years of pc'ing, and this is exactly why. Stay far away from this drive. It's a 4 tb drive with only 600 gigs that are actually usable. Pathetic. I'll be sending it in for warranty, but from what I have read, Toshiba's warranty department is flat out garbage and they don't actually send you a new drive, just a check for your purchase price. So if you get this drive on sale, you are doomed. Stay away.
originally posted on bestbuy.com
I purchased two of these to use in an External Hard Drive RAID Enclosure. I evaluated these against the Seagate and Western Digital options for this drive size and speed (7200RPM). I have had a few Western Digital and Seagate drives fail in the past so I was not entirely sold on their reliability over other name brands. My experience with Toshiba drives over the years has only been with laptop hard drives but I have yet to see one fail. So far these drives are performing better than I expected. They run cool and fast generating no heat that I can tell. I saw others had complained about the noise these drives make but I have not found that to be an issue at all. I am very please with the performance of these drives so far. These are a higher grade drive than your ... MoreI purchased two of these to use in an External Hard Drive RAID Enclosure. I evaluated these against the Seagate and Western Digital options for this drive size and speed (7200RPM). I have had a few Western Digital and Seagate drives fail in the past so I was not entirely sold on their reliability over other name brands. My experience with Toshiba drives over the years has only been with laptop hard drives but I have yet to see one fail. So far these drives are performing better than I expected. They run cool and fast generating no heat that I can tell. I saw others had complained about the noise these drives make but I have not found that to be an issue at all. I am very please with the performance of these drives so far. These are a higher grade drive than your typical desktop hard drive. They have a higher mean time between failures rating and come with a 3 Year warranty.
originally posted on newegg.com
I have a central home server NAS that I run for my day to day and family file options. The box is mostly comprised of WD Red NAS drives in different sets of disk arrays depending on the purpose. But suffice it to say that normally they are working in pairs of disks. I didn't have 2 of these to pair together, so I was forced to come up with a single duty task to test it with. My internet connection tops out at 9Mpbs. I have multiple gamers in the household and the small bandwidth makes downloading games a multi-day affair. To mitigate this we'll usually delegate a single machine to download the game first, then back it up and store it centrally for all machines to restore from. So I have terabytes upon terabytes of game backups that get passed around. So I chose this ... MoreI have a central home server NAS that I run for my day to day and family file options. The box is mostly comprised of WD Red NAS drives in different sets of disk arrays depending on the purpose. But suffice it to say that normally they are working in pairs of disks. I didn't have 2 of these to pair together, so I was forced to come up with a single duty task to test it with. My internet connection tops out at 9Mpbs. I have multiple gamers in the household and the small bandwidth makes downloading games a multi-day affair. To mitigate this we'll usually delegate a single machine to download the game first, then back it up and store it centrally for all machines to restore from. So I have terabytes upon terabytes of game backups that get passed around. So I chose this drive to handle that duty as I need a lot of space for storage, but don't necessarily need redundancy for this type of data. Also, it's probably the most frequently used share from the server. I know newegg probably hates my turn around times for product reviews. But I honestly feel its a problem these days where reviewers give their opinion of something based on the spec sheet and how it performed for a few days. I've had this drive now for a month and a half using it the whole time. I tried putting through it paces and just making sure it wouldn't die prematurely, like so many products often do. Granted, in the span of time a drive should last, one and a half months is still relatively short, but I have to review it at some point. It's worked great the entire time I've been using it. It's louder than any other drive I have in the system though. It also seems to run pretty hot for some reason. To mount it had to grab some front loading hot swap bays. Now because of the heat, I may need to figure out how to get better airflow over it too. Regardless, I think the product competes well in the market. It's performance on reads are pretty good, beating out the other drives I'm using. Plus it costs less than either WD or Seagate. So if you are running a central NAS with decent airflow and away from being heard, I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't use this Toshiba drive over the competition.
| Hard drive | |
| Mean time between failures (MTBF) | 1000000 h |
| Hard drive interface transfer rate | 6 Gbit/s |
| Average latency | 4.17 ms |
| Component for | NAS |
I got this drive for media storage. It only has about 700 gigs on it and the read speeds have gotten so low that it has rendered it practically useless. No, my sata lanes are not throttled; I can hook up a 1tb WD on the same port/cable and get over 200 mb/s every time, and I have tried hooking the Toshiba up to every other sata port I have on 3 separate pc's as well as my friend's pc, none of which have changed the read speeds. Eventually I decided to short stroke this hdd into 3 partitions as a last resort hail mary before sending it in for warranty. That has gotten my first partition of 600gb to read/write around 100 mb/s with the other two 1.5tb partitions severely degrading in performance the closer it gets to the platter's middle. It's usable now anyway, that's ... MoreI got this drive for media storage. It only has about 700 gigs on it and the read speeds have gotten so low that it has rendered it practically useless. No, my sata lanes are not throttled; I can hook up a 1tb WD on the same port/cable and get over 200 mb/s every time, and I have tried hooking the Toshiba up to every other sata port I have on 3 separate pc's as well as my friend's pc, none of which have changed the read speeds. Eventually I decided to short stroke this hdd into 3 partitions as a last resort hail mary before sending it in for warranty. That has gotten my first partition of 600gb to read/write around 100 mb/s with the other two 1.5tb partitions severely degrading in performance the closer it gets to the platter's middle. It's usable now anyway, that's about the best I can say for it. The first 600 gigs benchmark at 180 mb/s but even when it's short stroked I still get nowhere near those speeds, and even at it's best performance on the short stroke it is still 60 mb/s away from advertised speeds. I have only ever used Western Digital hdd's over my 30+ years of pc'ing, and this is exactly why. Stay far away from this drive. It's a 4 tb drive with only 600 gigs that are actually usable. Pathetic. I'll be sending it in for warranty, but from what I have read, Toshiba's warranty department is flat out garbage and they don't actually send you a new drive, just a check for your purchase price. So if you get this drive on sale, you are doomed. Stay away.
I purchased two of these to use in an External Hard Drive RAID Enclosure. I evaluated these against the Seagate and Western Digital options for this drive size and speed (7200RPM). I have had a few Western Digital and Seagate drives fail in the past so I was not entirely sold on their reliability over other name brands. My experience with Toshiba drives over the years has only been with laptop hard drives but I have yet to see one fail. So far these drives are performing better than I expected. They run cool and fast generating no heat that I can tell. I saw others had complained about the noise these drives make but I have not found that to be an issue at all. I am very please with the performance of these drives so far. These are a higher grade drive than your ... MoreI purchased two of these to use in an External Hard Drive RAID Enclosure. I evaluated these against the Seagate and Western Digital options for this drive size and speed (7200RPM). I have had a few Western Digital and Seagate drives fail in the past so I was not entirely sold on their reliability over other name brands. My experience with Toshiba drives over the years has only been with laptop hard drives but I have yet to see one fail. So far these drives are performing better than I expected. They run cool and fast generating no heat that I can tell. I saw others had complained about the noise these drives make but I have not found that to be an issue at all. I am very please with the performance of these drives so far. These are a higher grade drive than your typical desktop hard drive. They have a higher mean time between failures rating and come with a 3 Year warranty.
I have a central home server NAS that I run for my day to day and family file options. The box is mostly comprised of WD Red NAS drives in different sets of disk arrays depending on the purpose. But suffice it to say that normally they are working in pairs of disks. I didn't have 2 of these to pair together, so I was forced to come up with a single duty task to test it with. My internet connection tops out at 9Mpbs. I have multiple gamers in the household and the small bandwidth makes downloading games a multi-day affair. To mitigate this we'll usually delegate a single machine to download the game first, then back it up and store it centrally for all machines to restore from. So I have terabytes upon terabytes of game backups that get passed around. So I chose this ... MoreI have a central home server NAS that I run for my day to day and family file options. The box is mostly comprised of WD Red NAS drives in different sets of disk arrays depending on the purpose. But suffice it to say that normally they are working in pairs of disks. I didn't have 2 of these to pair together, so I was forced to come up with a single duty task to test it with. My internet connection tops out at 9Mpbs. I have multiple gamers in the household and the small bandwidth makes downloading games a multi-day affair. To mitigate this we'll usually delegate a single machine to download the game first, then back it up and store it centrally for all machines to restore from. So I have terabytes upon terabytes of game backups that get passed around. So I chose this drive to handle that duty as I need a lot of space for storage, but don't necessarily need redundancy for this type of data. Also, it's probably the most frequently used share from the server. I know newegg probably hates my turn around times for product reviews. But I honestly feel its a problem these days where reviewers give their opinion of something based on the spec sheet and how it performed for a few days. I've had this drive now for a month and a half using it the whole time. I tried putting through it paces and just making sure it wouldn't die prematurely, like so many products often do. Granted, in the span of time a drive should last, one and a half months is still relatively short, but I have to review it at some point. It's worked great the entire time I've been using it. It's louder than any other drive I have in the system though. It also seems to run pretty hot for some reason. To mount it had to grab some front loading hot swap bays. Now because of the heat, I may need to figure out how to get better airflow over it too. Regardless, I think the product competes well in the market. It's performance on reads are pretty good, beating out the other drives I'm using. Plus it costs less than either WD or Seagate. So if you are running a central NAS with decent airflow and away from being heard, I can't think of a reason why you wouldn't use this Toshiba drive over the competition.
The 3-year warranty is welcome. If you're using it for business, I would feel very comfortable knowing we ran these. We swap out drives every single year, so when a drive has a shorter warranty than this, I normally keep looking. So this drive will be staying in the central NAS at the office until I replace it next year this time. The other drives in my NAS are not "designed" for NAS like this drive, and I thought it was interesting how the mechanics actually sound different in this one. You can tell it's optimized or something. I think my bottleneck was the network adapter, but I have used this drive for nightly backups, scheduled simultaneously, for the last two or three weeks and it hasn't failed. The NAS fan isn't kicking on any more than usual so I imagine it's ... MoreThe 3-year warranty is welcome. If you're using it for business, I would feel very comfortable knowing we ran these. We swap out drives every single year, so when a drive has a shorter warranty than this, I normally keep looking. So this drive will be staying in the central NAS at the office until I replace it next year this time. The other drives in my NAS are not "designed" for NAS like this drive, and I thought it was interesting how the mechanics actually sound different in this one. You can tell it's optimized or something. I think my bottleneck was the network adapter, but I have used this drive for nightly backups, scheduled simultaneously, for the last two or three weeks and it hasn't failed. The NAS fan isn't kicking on any more than usual so I imagine it's not getting hot like some performance drives I've had in there. Bottom line, I'm impressed with the quality and will be looking into Toshiba drives in the future. I was going to throw this in the server to run test in that environment, but that's not what it's for, so I didn't.
For testing it would be toughest conditions first. After getting the drive freshly formatted as NTFS, I took it to my workstation in my garage. I only get to use the garage for maybe three-and-half seasons, as mid-summer heat in the garage gets too hot to operate consistently. None-the-less, being the dedicated tester which I am, I forged on and fired it up after installing the drive (this was posted late July). I shut off the monitors and went to another workstation inside the much cooler house. I transferred 190GBs of MP3s to the drive without a hitch. I continued to let it run successfully for a full twenty-four hours, making a magnitude of transfers to the drive in baking heat with no problems. Then I shut the machine down and popped the drive back in an eSATA ... MoreFor testing it would be toughest conditions first. After getting the drive freshly formatted as NTFS, I took it to my workstation in my garage. I only get to use the garage for maybe three-and-half seasons, as mid-summer heat in the garage gets too hot to operate consistently. None-the-less, being the dedicated tester which I am, I forged on and fired it up after installing the drive (this was posted late July). I shut off the monitors and went to another workstation inside the much cooler house. I transferred 190GBs of MP3s to the drive without a hitch. I continued to let it run successfully for a full twenty-four hours, making a magnitude of transfers to the drive in baking heat with no problems. Then I shut the machine down and popped the drive back in an eSATA sled connected to a workstation in the house. For this local transfer I was moving 323GB of videos. It pushed all that data without dropping a bit. All the remaining tests performed, which filled the drive to near capacity, were smooth and problem free. Temperatures remained nominal during usage (excepting the period in the garage, as was expected.)
Let's start with some numbers obtained from CrystalDiskMark 3.0.4 running a 4000MB test size. While empty the drive achieved sequential read and write speeds of 206MB/s and 205MB/s respectively and 4K speeds of 0.75MB/s and 1.75MB/s. With about 1.7TB of data on it the sequential speeds dropped to 182MB/s read and 180MB/s write and the 4K speeds dropped to 0.51MB/s and 1.58MB/s. For a spinning drive, the sequential speeds are good and the 4K speeds are to be expected. These Toshiba drives (the N300 and X300) differentiate themselves from the competitors in one major way, price. These drives are significantly cheaper while still offering similar performance and features. The only area these drives fall behind in is the warranty. This N300 only has a 3 year warranty ... MoreLet's start with some numbers obtained from CrystalDiskMark 3.0.4 running a 4000MB test size. While empty the drive achieved sequential read and write speeds of 206MB/s and 205MB/s respectively and 4K speeds of 0.75MB/s and 1.75MB/s. With about 1.7TB of data on it the sequential speeds dropped to 182MB/s read and 180MB/s write and the 4K speeds dropped to 0.51MB/s and 1.58MB/s. For a spinning drive, the sequential speeds are good and the 4K speeds are to be expected. These Toshiba drives (the N300 and X300) differentiate themselves from the competitors in one major way, price. These drives are significantly cheaper while still offering similar performance and features. The only area these drives fall behind in is the warranty. This N300 only has a 3 year warranty while the higher priced competition has a 5 year warranty. In my opinion, the increase in price is not worth the extra length of warranty. One other thing I have noticed about this drive is that it is a little louder and a little hotter than other drives. When benchmarking and transferring large amounts of data, the HDD is noticeably audible. In terms of heat, I have noticed this drive operating about 3°C warmer than other drives in the same cage. While these things are minor and relatively insignificant on a single drive, many drives together in an array could stack the effects and have a significant impact. Overall, this is a good drive for mass storage in any device at a good price. While it is targeted towards NAS with a continuous use rating, it would work just fine as a standard HDD in just about anything. And in regards to the "RAID support" marketing, I have yet to find a HDD that did not work with RAID.
I am using this hard drive as a primary desktop drive (EXT4 format) running Mageia Linux. The HDWQ140 replaced a PATA Seagate Barracuda ST3500630A, so any comparisons I make are relative to that hard drive. The Toshiba is fast: cold boot times (from power-on to desktop login) have gone from roughly 1 minute 15 seconds to about 25 seconds. Three runs of hdparm -Ttv yielded speeds of around 200MB/sec, in line with what Toshiba reports, so I have no issues with the drive's speed. The HDWQ140's sounds are pitched higher than my old ST3500630A's. When reading/writing, the Toshiba makes a "chir-chir" sound whereas the ST3500630A made more of a "dut-dut" sound. That being said, I do not find these sounds unpleasant, but they are audible. In my particular setup, the major ... MoreI am using this hard drive as a primary desktop drive (EXT4 format) running Mageia Linux. The HDWQ140 replaced a PATA Seagate Barracuda ST3500630A, so any comparisons I make are relative to that hard drive. The Toshiba is fast: cold boot times (from power-on to desktop login) have gone from roughly 1 minute 15 seconds to about 25 seconds. Three runs of hdparm -Ttv yielded speeds of around 200MB/sec, in line with what Toshiba reports, so I have no issues with the drive's speed. The HDWQ140's sounds are pitched higher than my old ST3500630A's. When reading/writing, the Toshiba makes a "chir-chir" sound whereas the ST3500630A made more of a "dut-dut" sound. That being said, I do not find these sounds unpleasant, but they are audible. In my particular setup, the major annoyance is a slight "hiccup" every five seconds or so, which I think is a read/write of minimal data, but I do not think this is the fault of the drive; my guess is that either the OS or the programs I am using (or both) are to blame. Toshiba packages the hard drive in a plastic bag (which did not appear to be an anti-static one) and fits it snugly into a 2-piece "sleeve" that has multiple plastic air cushions, so it does seem as if there is no way for it to move around inside the box. There are no SATA cables or screws, so make sure you pick some up elsewhere.
So here is the good stuff! I ran this drive threw it's paces. My new AMD Ryzen 7 1700 build is housed in an In Win 301 MicroATX case. Not known for high airflow but so far I haven't encountered any cooling issues. Perhaps with higher TDP systems, but based on my 65w 1700 .. it's been just fine. First, someone was concerned about the heat output of this drive. On average I saw the drive float around 43c or 109f. That is still well within expected operating temps by Toshiba with a 5 to 55c optimal range. Would probably average out lower in a standard form factor system where the drive would sit low in the chassis and in front of the intake fan. If you are concerned about heat... I wouldn't be. Next, I ran it through some benchmark software and was happy to see that ... MoreSo here is the good stuff! I ran this drive threw it's paces. My new AMD Ryzen 7 1700 build is housed in an In Win 301 MicroATX case. Not known for high airflow but so far I haven't encountered any cooling issues. Perhaps with higher TDP systems, but based on my 65w 1700 .. it's been just fine. First, someone was concerned about the heat output of this drive. On average I saw the drive float around 43c or 109f. That is still well within expected operating temps by Toshiba with a 5 to 55c optimal range. Would probably average out lower in a standard form factor system where the drive would sit low in the chassis and in front of the intake fan. If you are concerned about heat... I wouldn't be. Next, I ran it through some benchmark software and was happy to see that the results I obtained were within the margin of error that other reviewers scores on review sites. My scores were as follows, performed on an MSI Mortor Arctic B350 motherboard. Crystal Disk Mark 5.2.1 ATTO Disk Benchmark Read: 209.2 MB/s Write: 209.3 MB/s Read: 211.7 MB/s Write: 211.7 MB/s Anvil Storage 1.1.0 HD Tune Read: 200 MB/s Write: 199.1 MB/s Read: 217.5 MB/s Write: 211.4 MB/s Acc. Time: 7.9 ms So according to the benchmark scores.. they all were within a few MB/s of each other. So very believable results. So next, I wanted to see some real world performance by transferring real files to and from the drive. Here are my results: Transfered Steam Games from my OCZ Deneva 2 400GB SSD to the Toshiba 6TB HDD - Team Fortress 2 - 18.1 GB took 2 min 16 sec = 133 MB/s Avg. Project Cars - 21.6 GB took 2 min 36 sec = 138 MB/s Avg. Skull Girls - 4.24 GB took 24 sec = 176 MB/s Avg. Using TeraCopy to copy Pictures from External USB 3.0 Samsung EVO 840 SSD to Toshiba 6TB Pictures Folder - 12.1GB in 1 min 51 seconds = 109 MB/s Pictures Folder from Toshiba to SSD took 1 min 55 seconds - 105 MB/s Copied 4GB of Large Continuous Installer Files from USB 3.0 - 3.98 GB in 32 seconds - 124 MB/s Copied Avengers 720p Rip - 6.5GB 36.78 seconds = 180.5 MB/s Write 36.45 seconds = 180.0 MB/s Read Finally, I copied my downloads folder which is a good mix of everything. From Music, Videos, Docs, ISO's, Programs, etc... I figured this would be a great final test of real world results as many of you will be purchasing this drive to copy entire folders of your stuff and walk away. The super Toshiba copied 33.2 GB of my data from the USB 3.0 Samsung SSD in 5 minutes 30 seconds. This averages to about 101 MB/s. Bottom line? You will see over 100 MB/s transfer speeds as a minimum. Which for a hard drive is still pretty good. In some cases close to 200!! But on average I'd say you'll see 100 to 150 which is fine for most of us. You won't be waiting hours to transfer your files to this shiny new drive. I'm very very happy with performance. I almost forgot to mention. For those of you who plan to use this as a end all be all Steam games drive, fear not. Project Cars, TF2, Gears of War 4 and several others play flawlessly with minimal load times or dropped frame rates. The N300 feels like it can keep pace providing a smooth gaming experience even compared to my OCZ SSD. Again, I can't sing this drives praises enough. A bit on the high end on cost but for the performance it works out. Buy it!
This drive is marketed as a NAS drive, mainly for data backup as that’s what most NAS systems are for. Along those lines, the drive is also marketed as a highly reliable drive, something NAS owners value in a hard drive. Let me just say that over the last 30 years of working with and building PCs, Toshiba drives have impressed me the most for their reliability strengths. When my Western Digitals and Seagates have reliably failed me, my Toshiba drives have always come through. In fact, I have never had a Toshiba drive fail on me, so as far as reliability from my point of view, the name alone is marketing enough. Installing this drive was as easy as any other drive, quickly recognized by my bios and properly formatted. Most of my testing was using the drive directly ... MoreThis drive is marketed as a NAS drive, mainly for data backup as that’s what most NAS systems are for. Along those lines, the drive is also marketed as a highly reliable drive, something NAS owners value in a hard drive. Let me just say that over the last 30 years of working with and building PCs, Toshiba drives have impressed me the most for their reliability strengths. When my Western Digitals and Seagates have reliably failed me, my Toshiba drives have always come through. In fact, I have never had a Toshiba drive fail on me, so as far as reliability from my point of view, the name alone is marketing enough. Installing this drive was as easy as any other drive, quickly recognized by my bios and properly formatted. Most of my testing was using the drive directly through my motherboard. I do have a NAS device that I installed the drive into, and as expected, it worked just fine. Speeds were close enough to the advertised numbers to make me happy, and as far as other points of performance, heat, noise, spin-up, etc. all were easily within industry norms. Some reviews say it is noisy, but I think that the noise that it does make is just at a more noticeable pitch and not necessarily louder. It’s not a big enough issue to consider in my opinion. Using this drive as a system’s main C drive would work fine, although I am a big believer of SSD’s for that purpose. Its 4 terabyte capacity at its current price point is very nice. It comes with a 3 year warranty, though I wouldn’t expect I’d have to use it. Small things like the location of mounting screw holes were accurate and ample. The cables fit tightly and the drive is simple and elegant in the way it looks. I would recommend this drive for any common application and I think it would be a really good drive for using in your Network Attached Storage system, eight of them in fact.
The drive comes wrapped in a big comfy , form-fitted, bubblewrap pillow...slim chance to be damaged in transit. I did not run this in a NAS enclosure, so maybe that is why my temperatures were also reporting as quite normal peaking at 39C. The drive is residing in my SIlverstone GD09B HTPC case. I do have all (3) 120mm fan locations populated for airflow through the case...but it's not anything spectacular, especially with the absolutely inaudible SilenX Effizio fans I'm using. Drive is remarkably quiet from my stand point. When initially formatted I did a quick transfer of ~220GB, 40 movies, to get the juices flowing. Drive barely makes a peep...I had to turn off the air purifier in my living room and get up close and personal to hear it working. Once installed in ... MoreThe drive comes wrapped in a big comfy , form-fitted, bubblewrap pillow...slim chance to be damaged in transit. I did not run this in a NAS enclosure, so maybe that is why my temperatures were also reporting as quite normal peaking at 39C. The drive is residing in my SIlverstone GD09B HTPC case. I do have all (3) 120mm fan locations populated for airflow through the case...but it's not anything spectacular, especially with the absolutely inaudible SilenX Effizio fans I'm using. Drive is remarkably quiet from my stand point. When initially formatted I did a quick transfer of ~220GB, 40 movies, to get the juices flowing. Drive barely makes a peep...I had to turn off the air purifier in my living room and get up close and personal to hear it working. Once installed in the HTPC chassis, there is absolutely no sound whatsoever which is a bonus for my application. As previously mentioned drive temperature peaked at 39C, while being remarkably quiet, even through ~3.5 hours transferring my 1.91TB movie collection comprised of 488 movies varying in size from 700MB to 20GB. That breaks down to an average of 140MB/s, which is quite swell for real-world performance. Transfer of my wife's 87.3GB photo collection was a bit slower unsurprisingly. It is a whopping 23k pictures, greatly varying in size, which took 14 minutes and breaks down to 100 MB/s; also not bad at all. From my experience tinkering with PCs for half my existence on this beautiful blue rock, which is 16 years, I have come to notice that Toshiba drives generally just...keep...working. When I upgrade a laptop, which is *still functioning* but well beyond 'normal' useful life expectancy, to an SSD, more often than not I am pulling out a Toshiba drive. This is why I say Toshiba has reliable drives.... Even if it isn't reliable, then you're still backed by a 3 year warranty with a company who has knowledgeable and competent tech support who will promptly process an RMA if need be. I only know this because I **MISTAKENLY** RMA'd (2) drives to Toshiba thinking they were faulty. The experience with their customer support was pleasant and painless. I RMA'd the drives thinking they were faulty when the drives would lose power and connect/disconnect at random. The actual issue ended up being my PSU. However, Toshiba had already reimbursed me *SIGNIFICANTLY MORE* than my purchase price of the drive by time I figured this out weeks later when my 6TB WD Black started exhibiting the same issue AND I noticed all the LEDs in my case were flickering at the same time as the HDD disconnects. I paid $125 for a 4TB PH3400U from Newegg, but they sent me a Visa gift card for $242! I don't know how they calculated the value, but I surely wasn't complaining. Bottom line here folks is this is a quality drive, packed with care , that performs admirably for a reasonable price. Add top notch customer support to the mix and you have an excellent package. Grab one and I'm sure you won't be disappointed!
| Hard drive | |
| Mean time between failures (MTBF) | 1000000 h |
| Hard drive interface transfer rate | 6 Gbit/s |
| Average latency | 4.17 ms |
| Component for | NAS |
