HDD by stefan @ 2013-05-07
The DT01ACA300 3TB drive from Toshiba features good performances and are in fact rebadged Hitachi HDS723030BLE640 units, a newer version compared to the drives we have tested in the past (as external enclosures). The DT01ACA300 are priced quite good and we would like to recommend them for home users which need more storage space.
At first we would like to thank Toshiba Corporation for offering a sample of their DT01ACA300 HDD for testing and reviewing.
“Toshiba is a world leader and innovator in pioneering high technology, a diversified manufacturer and marketer of advanced electronic and electrical products spanning information & communications systems; digital consumer products; electronic devices and components; power systems, including nuclear energy; industrial and social infrastructure systems; and home appliances. Toshiba was founded in 1875, and today operates a global network of more than 740 companies, with 204,000 employees worldwide and annual sales surpassing 6.3 trillion yen (US$68 billion).”
Up to 3TB capacity
7200 RPM performance
For use in consumer and commercial computers
6 Gb/s SATA Interface
Halogen-free design and power-efficient operation
Our Toshiba DT01ACA300 HDD sample has arrived in a bare form, only wrapped inside a sealed anti-static, moisture barrier bag:
On the top side of the drive we will find a large sticker with different information:
Here we will be able to see the product code number, the revision, serial number, capacity, LBA, CHS, power rating, SATA type or date of manufacture:
On the sides of the drive we will see the mounting holes:
In the front, the drive has some additional bar codes:
The back side presents itself with the usual SATA Data/Power connectors and two additional pins:
On the bottom side of the drive, we will see the electronic board and the power link to the HDD motor:
The test bench was composed from the following hardware:
CPU: Intel I7 3770K @ stock
Motherboard: ASRock Z77 Fatal1ty Professional
RAM: 4x8GB GeIL Leggera 2133MHz
Video: AMD Radeon HD 7970
Power Supply: Nexus RX-8500 850W modular
HDD: Seagate Barracuda 500GB 7200.11
SSD: Patriot Pyro 120GB
Case: Thermaltake Armor+ LCS, stock cooling
OS: Windows 7 Ultimate x64
The drive does ship unformatted:
After the drive has been formatted here we have the total free space reported by Windows:
With AIDA64 Ultimate software tool, we can extract more information regarding the internal drive:
Extra tests:
The new DT01ACA300 3TB drives from Toshiba are quite speedy and more importantly, they are some of the cheapest on the market with this capacity. Because of this, we won’t hesitate to recommend them to the mainstream which needs higher storage capacity in their computers or simply has bought recently a NAS with 2 or 4 bays and wants to fill it out.
As we have learned from the web, the drives beginning with the HDKPC08 serial number are rebadged Hitachi (HGST) HDS723030BLE640 units. In the past we have tested 3GB HDS723030ALA640 drives, which are an older revision. With the A6, we have native 512 blocks, while with the B6, the blocks are native 4K and feature 512 emulation.
We like the fact that the HDD prices have returned to the ones before the flood (pretty much) and they will become our favorite again for storing large amounts of data.
The model that we have just tested is available online for about 110 Euros.
We would like to thank again to Toshiba Corporation for making this review possible!