TOSHIBA N300 HDWG180XZSTA 8TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" High-Reliability Hard Drive

Pros: 1. Reasonably fast for disk drive 2. Tolerates heat well 3. Would not die I set this in a small enclosure. I then pilled stuff around it, to get it hot. This plan did not work well. The drive runs pretty cool. So I got an enclosure with a fan, shut the fan off and blocked the vents. It did not die. It just does not get that hot. That is a very good sign.

Cons: None that I could find.

Overall Review: This is a good choice for a NAS drive or in a server setting. The drive seems to be able to withstand hot environments. This is very important for this kind of application. You want this kind of drive to be around for many, many years. I would be comfortable using this say a Raid 5 array or the like. I do not really like Raid ), but Raid 1 would be a good choice as well. One other thought is a desk top with a ssd and then this as the drive for storage. This is a large drive. Lots of photos, games, music, etc. It is pretty fast due to its large cache. Of course it will never make SSD speeds. The final thought for users, would be like profession photographers/videographers. A few of these in Raid 5 would give you a tremendous amount of storage, parity and decent speed. I know some have had problems with Toshiba drives in the past. The several drives that I have had, are still working. Including a drive that I have from around 2006.

Pros: Very fast - I tested with CrystalDiskMark and got read/write speeds of 240MB/s on the fresh drive and 145 MB/s on the last terabyte when I partitioned it off to represent a mostly full drive. These speeds were verified by real world testing with large file copies to and from the N300 using an SSD RAID 0 array to preclude bottlenecks. The drive is slightly faster and much quieter than a Toshiba X300 5TB drive I bought over a year ago. That is annoying loud on seeks even in a substantial USB3.0 enclosure, whereas the N300 is whisper quiet. I could barely hear it in an open test bed machine from two feet away. It also runs cooler than the X300, getting just warm to the touch after running read/write speed tests.

Cons: At time of writing and having owned the N300 for only two weeks without experiencing any faults, I cannot think of any cons. If it fails at some point or exhibits any unusual behavior I will update this review.

Overall Review: I normally don't award five eggs unhesitatingly to products I review, but the Toshiba N300 deserves it. I cannot fault this fast, quiet drive, and looking at other reviews it seems others share my opinion. Note: Newegg provided this product to me for review purposes.

Pros: - 7200 RPM and 128MB buffer - 3.63TB of formatted capacity

Cons: - 3 year warranty - A little hotter and louder than other drives

Overall Review: Let's start with some numbers obtained from CrystalDiskMark 3.0.4 running a 4000MB test size. While empty the drive achieved sequential read and write speeds of 206MB/s and 205MB/s respectively and 4K speeds of 0.75MB/s and 1.75MB/s. With about 1.7TB of data on it the sequential speeds dropped to 182MB/s read and 180MB/s write and the 4K speeds dropped to 0.51MB/s and 1.58MB/s. For a spinning drive, the sequential speeds are good and the 4K speeds are to be expected. These Toshiba drives (the N300 and X300) differentiate themselves from the competitors in one major way, price. These drives are significantly cheaper while still offering similar performance and features. The only area these drives fall behind in is the warranty. This N300 only has a 3 year warranty while the higher priced competition has a 5 year warranty. In my opinion, the increase in price is not worth the extra length of warranty. One other thing I have noticed about this drive is that it is a little louder and a little hotter than other drives. When benchmarking and transferring large amounts of data, the HDD is noticeably audible. In terms of heat, I have noticed this drive operating about 3°C warmer than other drives in the same cage. While these things are minor and relatively insignificant on a single drive, many drives together in an array could stack the effects and have a significant impact. Overall, this is a good drive for mass storage in any device at a good price. While it is targeted towards NAS with a continuous use rating, it would work just fine as a standard HDD in just about anything. And in regards to the "RAID support" marketing, I have yet to find a HDD that did not work with RAID.

Pros: Just a great big drive. Popped it into my machine and copied files from my two 2TB drives pretty quickly over SATA. I've had it for running 24/7 for month and it's been reliable and runs cool. It was packaged well in the box, nice and protected.

Cons: None.

Overall Review: Great drive and saved me space in my case, and I have more storage than the two drives it replaced.

Pros: - Works at advertised speeds - Runs quiet and cool - Zero issues with running in a custom-built NAS running OpenMediaVault

Cons: - None

Overall Review: - There's nothing really too exciting about this drive; it performs as-advertised, and works well in a NAS situation. Would have no problems with recommending or buying more of this drive in the future! - I use this drive in a 1.8GHz single-core NAS on a 1Gbps connection; I easily reach the max speed of that on both reads and writes even for long-running transfers.

Pros: - Setup is straight forward – Install, format, usage - Speeds are pretty good for an HDD (not using it for NAS) - Price - Much cheaper than the $1,500 price tag on 4TB SSD’s

Cons: None

Overall Review: I saw no reason at all to knock an egg off this review, 5 eggs! Yes, you can hear it. This is an HDD, so that is expected and it is quieter than my other HDD’s from competitors. When comparing specs (SATA 6.0 Gb/s, 128MB Cache, 4TB), this is on the lower end of the price scale. I haven’t seen one hiccup or anomaly that would lead me to be concerned about using this thing. This arrived just as I decided to rebuild my home machine, so it has been through 2 builds in its short time in my home and it hasn’t disappointed. I used it to dump large amounts of data for quick backup, transfers were quick and I would not hesitate to look at the Toshiba N300 product line again. As another reviewer mentioned, it is hard to write a review for an HDD after it has been used for a few weeks; but it works and my speed tests are right in line others. Looking for a HDD for mass storage with good speeds, it would be a mistake to over look this drive.

Pros: - Quiet - Fast - Runs very cool - Enough space for literally anything! - Reliable - 3 year warranty

Cons: No cons really, unless you count the fact that I loved this drive so much, I just had to buy a second one for my NAS.

Overall Review: I've been running 2x Toshiba 2TB drives in my NAS for a couple of years now, and the performance has been great. I've had no issues with reliability or performance. However, lately I've been running very low on space so I decided to replace both drives with two of these 8TB drives. After backing up my data from the old drives, I popped two of these Toshiba 8TB into my NAS, and I've seen no problems thus far. In fact, file transfers are a bit faster now! These drives run very cool, and quiet, while providing enough space to keep up with my needs for the next several years. I've always found Toshiba hard drives to be very reliable, and priced VERY competitively, and if anything should go wrong they are backed by a 3 year warranty. Honestly, I couldn't be happier, and will continue to use Toshiba drives. If you have a NAS unit, and you're looking for the best bang for your buck, these 8TB are a no-brainer upgrade!

Pros: Very well packaged as my fellow Eggxpert reviewers have also mentioned. Drive ran quite cool from my experience Great customer support. Very, very quiet drive Toshiba reliability Feels quite solid 3 yr warranty Large cache

Cons: Hmm...the bland label? It doesn't have a cool name like the Skyhawk drive it is replacing? Not much really...unless it decides to self destruct prematurely on me....if it does, I'll be back to write another review.

Overall Review: The drive comes wrapped in a big comfy , form-fitted, bubblewrap pillow...slim chance to be damaged in transit. I did not run this in a NAS enclosure, so maybe that is why my temperatures were also reporting as quite normal peaking at 39C. The drive is residing in my SIlverstone GD09B HTPC case. I do have all (3) 120mm fan locations populated for airflow through the case...but it's not anything spectacular, especially with the absolutely inaudible SilenX Effizio fans I'm using. Drive is remarkably quiet from my stand point. When initially formatted I did a quick transfer of ~220GB, 40 movies, to get the juices flowing. Drive barely makes a peep...I had to turn off the air purifier in my living room and get up close and personal to hear it working. Once installed in the HTPC chassis, there is absolutely no sound whatsoever which is a bonus for my application. As previously mentioned drive temperature peaked at 39C, while being remarkably quiet, even through ~3.5 hours transferring my 1.91TB movie collection comprised of 488 movies varying in size from 700MB to 20GB. That breaks down to an average of 140MB/s, which is quite swell for real-world performance. Transfer of my wife's 87.3GB photo collection was a bit slower unsurprisingly. It is a whopping 23k pictures, greatly varying in size, which took 14 minutes and breaks down to 100 MB/s; also not bad at all. From my experience tinkering with PCs for half my existence on this beautiful blue rock, which is 16 years, I have come to notice that Toshiba drives generally just...keep...working. When I upgrade a laptop, which is *still functioning* but well beyond 'normal' useful life expectancy, to an SSD, more often than not I am pulling out a Toshiba drive. This is why I say Toshiba has reliable drives.... Even if it isn't reliable, then you're still backed by a 3 year warranty with a company who has knowledgeable and competent tech support who will promptly process an RMA if need be. I only know this because I **MISTAKENLY** RMA'd (2) drives to Toshiba thinking they were faulty. The experience with their customer support was pleasant and painless. I RMA'd the drives thinking they were faulty when the drives would lose power and connect/disconnect at random. The actual issue ended up being my PSU. However, Toshiba had already reimbursed me *SIGNIFICANTLY MORE* than my purchase price of the drive by time I figured this out weeks later when my 6TB WD Black started exhibiting the same issue AND I noticed all the LEDs in my case were flickering at the same time as the HDD disconnects. I paid $125 for a 4TB PH3400U from Newegg, but they sent me a Visa gift card for $242! I don't know how they calculated the value, but I surely wasn't complaining. Bottom line here folks is this is a quality drive, packed with care , that performs admirably for a reasonable price. Add top notch customer support to the mix and you have an excellent package. Grab one and I'm sure you won't be disappointed!