TOSHIBA PH3300U-1I72 3TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Pros: Quiet as my 2 year old Samsung F4 drives (before Seagate bought their HDD division). No problems setting it up and chkdsk /R showed no bad sectors or anything. The drive I got was manufactured Nov 2012 and the model was DT01ACA300.

Cons: none

Other Thoughts: I'm using a Z68 motherboard and Windows 7 Ultimate x64, so the drive only took a few seconds to get it up and running once I got into Windows.

Pros: Good capacity, good speed, good price! The packaging kept them safe during transport.

Cons: Not a brand I've bought from before. (Maybe that's not a con, really?)

Other Thoughts: I bought 5 of these together. Today their power-on hours will turn over 500. All five are running great with 0 errors.

Pros: fast, quiet, no problems so far. as usual speeds are theoretical and will never actually be reached in the END USER environment.

Cons: none at the moment

Other Thoughts: OK, this is the RETAIL version hence the PH3300U-1I72 description. Yes it is a DT01ACA300 drive (which is the OEM version). Different packaging, same drive. Some time spent on the Toshiba website will verify this. Also if you zoom in on the picture of the drive you can plainly see what you are getting. What gets me is there are totally different ratings depending on whether you're looking at the RETAIL or OEM packaging. Same drive, what gives?

Pros: Inexpensive.

Cons: This Hitachi hard drive was properly recognized by the computer a couple of times then stopped working. Then the computer would not recognize it during boot-up, in the set-up BIOS or in Windows. In my experience, it's extremely rare to have a hard drive fail during the first week of use and I will not trust the Toshiba/Hitachi link again.

Other Thoughts: I have been working with computers for 25 years and have rarely (<1%) seen DOA hard drives from any manufacturer. I thought I was buying a Toshiba hard drive but instead received a Hitachi. I've had many Hitachi hard drives but never one that failed so quickly.

Pros: High capacity, quiet, moderate temperature. And great price. Fast read/write speed that leaves my WD black 2GB in the dust. It's the first time I can enjoy copying files between my PCs that I can achieve 97% network utilization -- an amazing 120MB per second at peek.

Cons: Haven't found any

Other Thoughts: Need to wait and see if they will last long. I heard of people complaining about other brands of high capacity hard drives break down in short time.

I can't create RAID volume out of these drives since my BIOS is incapable. It requires a UEFI BIOS. I will upgrade later.

Pros: Price at $119 as shell shocker item, solid retail packing/no worry from shipping damage, huge disk storage space value for dollar if bought on sale.

Cons: no screws or sata cable. Unknown reliability - see notes below.

Did not show up initially in Windows 7.

I am running Windows 7 64 bit .
1. Make sure it shows up in motherboard BIOS first. Usually press "delete" key upon boot to get into it.
2. Go to Control Panel/System and Security and under Administrative Tools there should be "create and format hard disk partitions". Mine showed up only as "disk 1" and I had to mark partition as active as it was all "unallocated" space. As other mentioned, you have to use (GPT), GUID Partition Table instead of MBR option for Windows to see over 2TB hard drives. Older Windows XP may not have this option.

Other Thoughts: In my Asus P8Z68 Deluxe motherboard bios and in windows device manager, it clearly says it's a Toshiba DT01ACA300 instead of a TOSHIBA PH3300U-1I72 drive. It also clearly does NOT register as a Hitachi drive as people say it is or was. I purchased mine on April 8, 2013 and the date of manufacture or packaging on the static bag says Dec 2012. There is overt misrepresentation going on here as I paid to buy the Toshiba PH3300U-1I72 drive. In comparison to the other reviewer "narikin" who said he bought it on "April 7th, 2013" which was not the shell shocker sale day in which I bought it, he apparently got a Hitachi HDS723030BLE640 drive. Also to the other "N/A" reviewer who did buy on shell shocker day, he apparently got Hitachi drives verified by his bios although it BSOD on his WHS 2011 box.

I did a serial number search for remaining warranty and it "appears" to have 2.5 years left (which is short by about 6 months), but it also leaves me skeptical as to them repackaging a DT01ACA300 drive (which may have some physical differences) and simply adding an extra year onto the warranty and perhaps to just play the gambling game in hopes that it won't fail on the customer within the three years of supposed warranty and charging more money for this drive.

Tests:
1. HD Tune Pro:
Sequential reads 169MB/sec; writes 130MB/sec.
2. Crystal Disk Mark 3:
Sequential Read : 175.656 MB/s
Sequential Write : 145.534 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 56.092 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 71.703 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :0.733 MB/s [178.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 0.893 MB/s [18.1 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32):1.678 MB/s [409.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :0.690 MB/s [168.5 IOPS]

Conclusion:
This drive may not show up as an expected Hitachi drive or it may show up as a DT01ACA300, like my case with almost 6 months warranty passed, instead of a TOSHIBA PH3300U-1I72 drive with full 3 year warranty. I have not used it very much since I only took it out of the box yesterday, so I can't say if I got a good drive or not. Longevity and reliability is unknown currently.

Pros: No problems right outta box

Cons: none yet

Other Thoughts: owned these for a month or two now, have them in raid 0, no problems and ssd gen 1 speeds in a raid 0 array. Higly recommend.

Pros: Price, got it on sale. Retail Kit, nicely packed.

Cons: Retail kit didn't come anything extra, no screws or cable.

Other Thoughts: Paired this HDD with Hitachi Deskstar 3TB 5400 RPM 32MB Cache drive, which i bought from newegg in 2011 (for $109) in software Raid-1 in my OpenMediaVault server. I was concern mixing two different speed drives in raid, but its working good so far. The drive is identified as Hitachi. I transferred around 2TB data to this raid drives. I will grab more when they come in sale again.

Pros: I have had no issues with this HDD whatsoever.

Cons: None till now

Other Thoughts: I have seen some reviews saying that this drive has only a max of 2tb of space. That is incorrect. I think that these people are using the MBR for HDD management instead of the GUID Partition Table (GPT). MBR had a limit of 2tb for max HDD size and hence they get 750 gigs + of unallocated space.

Pros: None.

Cons: I lost 2.2 TB in less than 48 hours of removing drive from box. I bought two and had moved everything to the one drive before mirroring to the second. Did not even get the second drive installed before the drive switched to RAW and everything went poof. Drive analysis showed extensive bad clusters, orphaned files, jopurnal entries, the whole gambit. Hope you have better luck...