At first we would like to thank Toshiba Corporation for offering a sample of their MG04ACA400A Enterprise HDD for testing and reviewing.

 

 

About Toshiba:

 

“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).”

 

Product Features:

 

Industry Standard 3.5-inch 26.1 mm Height Form Factor

Large-Capacity (6 / 5 / 4 / 3 / 2 TB models)

7,200 rpm Performance

SATA 6.0 Gbit/s Interface

550 Total TB Transferred per Year Workload Rating

4Kn Advanced Format Sector Technology

 

Applications:

 

Engineered for Mid-line / Nearline Business Critical Workloads

Tier 2 Business-Critical Servers and Storage Systems

Servers Supporting Application Workloads that Benefit from High Capacity per Spindle

Capacity-Optimized Data Center Storage Systems

 

Product Specifications:

 

The latest MG04ACA series from Toshiba is aimed towards enterprise applications and these are available with different capacities: 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, 5TB or 6TB. Depending on the sector size, we have models ending with E, which do also have 512 B sector emulation and support legacy applications and operating environments which require sectors of this size, but also models ending with A, which lack this emulation capability. For the drives which are available to emulate 512 sectors, Toshiba also introduces the Persistent Write Cache Technology for Data-Loss Protection in a sudden power-loss event. Our drive has arrived in an OEM packaging, which was composed from a transparent plastic mold:

 

 

 

The drive retains the 3.5-inch 26.1 mm height form factor, with a width of 101.6 mm and a length of 147 mm. Also, the drive weights a total of 770g and on top we have a sticker which informs us regarding the power rating, manufacturing location, serial number, firmware or revision:

 

 

 

In the front we have an additional drive barcode:

 

 

 

The sides of the metallic drive chassis come with the mounting holes:

 

 

 

 

In the back, we have the SATA Data/Power connectors, but also some additional pins for factory purposes:

 

 

 

Here is also a quick look on the bottom, where we have the electronics part of the drive, along with the contacts which go straight to the motor (7200RPM):

 

 

 

 

The drive also holds 120MB of buffer and communicates on a 6 Gbit/s data bus:

 

 

 

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:

 

 

Test Results

CrystalMark

 

AIDA64 Disk Benchmark

 

HD Tach

 

HD Tune

 

 

CrystalDisk

 

ATTO Disk Benchmark

 

 

The new MG04ACA series from Toshiba is composed from drives which are meant for enterprise, mission-critical applications, while sporting higher transfer rates and capacities. The tested sample comes with 128MB of cache and comes in two versions, depending on the applications it is needed for: with 512 sector emulation or strictly with 4K sector. Make sure to choose wisely which drive is for you and your setups in order to bypass any incompatibilities which may arise.

 

Being enterprise drives, these are thoroughly tested and come with more fail-safe systems than their desktop-oriented variants; Toshiba rates these models for about 1400000 hours, workloads of 550TB/year and are fully approved for 24/7 operations.

 

Regarding the drive performance, MG04ACA400A performs much better than the drives we have previously tested and this way it justifies the higher price Toshiba charges for this model which is about 368 Euros. Additionally, system administrators can opt in for the 5TB variant which is about 440 Euros or the 6GB which price is undisclosed for now.

 

Toshiba MG04ACA400A Enterprise 4TB HDD is Recommended for:

 

 

We would like to thank Toshiba Corporation for making this review possible!