HDD by stefan @ 2018-11-20
With the launch of the N300 series, Toshiba has a strong competitor on the enterprise storage/NAS market, that is able to offer good transfer speeds, is able to handle about 180TB of data per year and is approved for 24/7 operation. The drives have a MTTF of 1 million hours and are available with four different capacities: 4TB, 6TB, 8TB (128MB cache) and 10TB (256MB cache).
At first we would like to thank Toshiba Corporation for offering a sample of their N300 8TB NAS Hard Drive for testing and reviewing.
“Toshiba Electronic Devices & Storage Corporation and its affiliates (Toshiba) supply a wide range of innovative hard disk drive (HDD) products to meet the varied demands of the diversified storage marketplace. Products include high capacity power-efficient storage for Cloud Data Centers, capacity and performance HDDs for Enterprise IT, client HDDs for PC/Desktop, and specialty drives for Surveillance, NAS systems, set-top box video, gaming and external storage. Toshiba aims to continue to advance HDD technologies and innovation to meet and exceed customer requirements across a broad spectrum of storage market segments.”
Designed for NAS
Through its contact with NAS manufacturers, Toshiba recognizes the need for high-reliability disks in support of modern data storage and retrieval demands including streaming, backup and archiving. The drive, which can support multi-RAID systems with up to 8 hard disk drives, allows large volumes of data to be reliably stored and accessed by multiple clients 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
Integrated RV sensors
Regular hard disk drives without RV sensors can affect the performance of a multi-bay NAS System by generating 'knock-on' vibration. N300 drives ensure high reliability by minimising vibration effects through their advanced control and sensing technology. Multiple sensors detect the slightest shock and built-in RV sensors also compensate for rotational vibration - eliminating the possibility of 'knock-on' vibration in multi-bay NAS configuration systems.
Reliable always-on operation
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.
High durability and heat prevention
Use of high-endurance components is one of the reasons that the N300 series offers better durability than other conventional hard disk drives. At the same time, automatic adjustment of seek speed to reduce heat during high-temperature operation further improves endurance in demanding situations.
High speed for multi-drive environment
High performance and fast read speed is made possible under high data access loads from multiple users thanks to 256 or 128 MB data buffer. This makes the drive suitable for small businesses and creative professionals looking for solutions to handle high data volumes using multi-RAID NAS environments.
Optimised cache allocation
Toshiba’s Dynamic Cache Technology, a self-contained cache algorithm with on-board buffer management, optimizes how the cache is allocated during read/write to provide the high-level performance demanded by real-time domains.
Built to deliver, designed to last
Toshiba is renowned the world over for 50 years of leading innovation – and the power behind its range of hard drives is no exception. Designed for high capacity and excellent performance, you can be sure that Toshiba’s wealth of experience in hard drives is at work in your storage system. A three year extended warranty is also included with the N300 for the ultimate peace of mind.
Just recently we have received a new HDD from Toshiba, this time taking part of their NAS series and to be more exact N300. The product is available with 4TB, 6TB, 8TB and 10TB capacities; the first three capacities come with 128MB buffer, while the 10TB version doubles it to 256MB. All models are running at 7200 RPM, do function on a SATA III 6.0 Gbit/s bus and are approved for 24/7 operation. Toshiba does recommend the series for NAS usage, in desktop RAID and servers, multimedia server storage, private cloud storage, but also small business server and storage; without a doubt, the drive can be installed in desktops as well.
We have received the drive in a plain cardboard enclosure with no visible inscriptions:
In order to avoid damages during transit, our sample was wrapped in a thick sponge-like layer:
Additionally, as any drive, the N300 was also packed inside a sealed anti-static bag:
The drive does share design elements with the previously-reviewed X300 and features a large sticker on top, with technical info:
Here we will get to see the capacity, rotational speed, buffer size, product serial number, firmware ID, hardware revision, power rating, manufacturing date and more:
On the frontal drive area, we will get to see an additional sticker with a serial number:
The sides do show the mounting holes:
The drive does feature the usual SATA/Power gold-plated connectors, but also some additional pins:
On the back, we can spot the PCB area, together with the motor contacts:
The test bench was composed from the following hardware:
CPU: Intel I5 8600K Retail
CPU Cooler: Deepcool Captain 240 EX RGB AIO
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z370 AORUS Ultra Gaming
RAM: Currently tested kit
Video: KFA2 GeForce GTX 1060 OC 6GB
Power Supply: Cooler Master 850W
SSD: OCZ Vector 150
Case: Cooler Master ATCS 840
The drive has arrived unformatted:
In order to conduct our tests, we went ahead and formatted the drive to NTFS:
With AIDA64 Engineer software tool, we can extract more information regarding the internal drive:
With the launch of the N300 series, Toshiba has a strong competitor on the enterprise storage/NAS market, that is able to offer good transfer speeds, is able to handle about 180TB of data per year and is approved for 24/7 operation. The drives have a MTTF of 1 million hours and are available with four different capacities: 4TB, 6TB, 8TB (128MB cache) and 10TB (256MB cache).
The drive managed to easily outperform the X300 6TB drive as well, that was designed for high-performance desktop use, especially in the sequential performance area.
The HDDs are becoming more and more accessible at high capacities, as the technology continues to develop. While the tested model is available online for about 222 Euros, the 10TB version can be purchased for about 287 Euros, the 6TB one for about 169 Euros, while the 4TB for about 119 Euros.
We would like to thank Toshiba Corporation for making this review possible!