Pros: None!

Cons: Initially it was okay, then suddenly it failed yesterday, cannot be recognized at all, I can hear some clicking sounds when getting very close to the disk. All the work in last 6 months is lost! Called the Toshiba department and they are not responsible for the data recovery. What the heck!

Pros: Not much to tell, works great as storage drive if you use an SSD for main. Average speed.

Cons: None at this point.

Pros: [-] Fast
[-] Run as cool as my WD Greens (2TB)
[-] Nice price (purchased when these were $20 more a piece)

Cons: [-] Aren't free?

Other Thoughts: I cannot speak for those that have had unfortunate luck with their drives. Manufacturers though have limited control over what their drives go through (retail, bare, does not matter) after they've left the manufacturing plant. In 3 days, five of these drives will hit their 1 year anniversary in my unRAID configuration (the first one) whilst 6 others in another unRAID will hit their 1 year anniversary in a little over a month. Smart reports are clean and no problems to report, significant or otherwise.

As to the reviewer that had one hitting 80 degrees CELSIUS? That is 176 degrees Fahrenheit, quite hot to say the least. It should go without saying, that, you should probably power down that machine and find the source. Air flow? (or serious lack thereof?) I keep my home "server room" at 74 degrees F, at 55% humidity (12,000 BTU portable AC with dehumidifying function). I realize this is not something everyone can do either due to design, housing associations/landlord or simply, electric bill. But, in the deep humid south where as I look now on a mid-August day, it is 91 degrees outside at 96% humidity and that is at nearly 3am (the "coldest" time of "night" around here). So, I admit the drives seldom hit higher than 34 degrees Celsius and that is usually only when a parity check is going.

TL;DR - $40 per TB for a relatively fast 7200 RPM 3TB drive. 11 of these drives in two systems, for a year and no issues.


*UPDATE: 2 years and 2 months later, these drives are still chugging along in my (first) UnRAID box. These account for 21 TB of the 41 TB in that box. All S.M.A.R.T. reports are just fine. I've got two more of these drive, one as a warm standby and the other getting ready to replace an old WDGreen 1TB. I'm preparing to place an order for two more, so I figured I would do a review update. And evidently I had to remove the HTML which is no longer allowed.

Pros: Bought in november 2013 and has so far run flawlessly. Can't really comment on performance as its being used for storage rather than as a system drive.

Cons: Nothing yet.

Other Thoughts: Still chugging along as of March 2016. Unlike my newer Toshiba, its fairly quiet. Maybe a little louder than my other drives, which are 5900 rpm, but not at all bad.

Pros: Great price! Great reliability! Bought December 2013 and is still working flawlessly!

Cons: Not as fast as newer drives but it is still totally acceptable!

Pros: Quick read/write speed.
High capacity.
Got 'em on a Black Friday super sale for an excellent price.
Quiet (not silent, but quiet).
They all still work.
3 year warranty.

UPDATE 2/7/2016: Two years later, all five drives are still running perfectly; no failures seen. Definitely recommended.

Cons: No screws, SATA cable, or data migration software was included (i.e. wasn't a true retail kit).

Other Thoughts: I bought five of these drives for a new FreeNAS build; I'd nearly run out of space on my older unit. the RAIDz2 configuration is, for all intents and purposes, a RAID6. FreeNAS has no issues with these drives at all; every drive was immediately seen as a full 3TB drive, and the array was created without any issue whatsoever.

A write test on the entire array (i.e. all five drives working in tandem) yielded a raw write speed of 284Megabytes/sec - yes, bytes, not bits. This is more than double the speed of a gigabit ethernet interface, so I'm quite impressed in that regard. Sure, SSDs would be faster no doubt, but to get 9 fault-tolerant terabytes of storage on SSDs would be a purchase approaching the cost of a new car, so "thoroughly saturating a gigabit network" is plenty fast for me.


All five drives are still spinning flawlessly. No failures in four months of 24/7 uptime for these drives. I nearly took off an egg for the lack of retail kit niceties, but since none of the drives have given me any issue at all, I'm hard pressed to actually do so. Time will tell if these drives withstand the test of time, but I've got a stack of dead hard disks in my closet from every manufacturer, so I'm willing to give Toshiba fair chance this time around...especially since my set of drives was nearly $150 less than the drives I was originally eyeballing for this project.

Definitely have at LEAST one drive's worth of fault tolerance; I recommend 2 drives of fault tolerance since one drive will take anywhere from 10 to 30 hours to rebuild.

Pros: - There is no Pros, because regardless of operation, no drive should break after 6 months...much less two.

Cons: - Two of these drives, purchased at exactly the same time, broke the exact same day. S.M.A.R.T. errors started being reported and bad head sounds started happening (a slight ticking). Then, dead, both drives.

Other Thoughts: I'll see it Toshiba support is as bad as some of the other reviewers have mentioned.

Pros: - Large for a reasonable price
- Worked well... for a while

Cons: - One of the three drives that I got for a RAID5 array failed after three months. Will need to purchase another to rebuild the RAID, as I can't wait for an RMA to get a replacement. Never had a drive fail that fast before, especially with a rather low usage rate (less than 5% busy.)

Other Thoughts: I'm not sure I'd recommend this for a non-RAID setup. I'd hate to see what would have happened if I lost 3TB of data because I didn't have it full RAID5.

Pros: Pretty fast for a 7200 rpm hard drive. Works like it should, setup was quick, and I had no hassle. I got the 3tb version, and so far it is exactly what I expected. Hopefully it doesn't grenade anytime soon like some other brands *cough* seagate.

Cons: It's not 4tb

Other Thoughts: If you need more storage, this is the best cheap and reliable drive I found.

Pros: Bought 2 of these in a Combo. One for Game Data, One for Multimedia. They seem to be working fine, but I'm hitting a wall occasionally. Other than this they are running well and quite. Will update as I find more.

Cons: Freezing up after long sessions of writing to one of them. Only happened a few times, and that was after about 1 hour of installs when first getting up and running. Has only happened a handful of times but these seem to be a possible culprit. Tracking it down but will not knock eggs atm since I don't know for sure!

Other Thoughts: none.