Toshiba N300 4TB NAS Internal Hard Drive 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 128MB Cache 3.5inch - HDWQ140XZSTA (RETAIL PACKAGE)

Pros: 8 tb size with a 3 year warranty.

Cons: None found at the moment.

Overall Review: My testing will be all mac based. First thing it comes as a blank hdd and I had to initialize. I used a 2014 mac mini base edition as my pc. It was partitioned as a bootable mac drive in under 1 minute. I am using a 2 drive external usb 3.0 dock to test it. https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA1DS3CG5700 I will first over write 3 times checking 0 over right speeds. I will then use superduper to copy the mac boot drive I will report speeds on that. I will run it as a boot drive. I will use it in a thunderbolt case to boot. I will get back to this review in a day. I am back early I am doing the apple secure erase as I type. I am writing 0's on pass I started at 1:22 pm it is now 5:46 pm and I have done 3 tb about 1 tb an hour to write zeros . The speed fluxes from 200mb to 250mb writing zeros. The drive in the dock is warm to the touch but not smoking hot. I will run this test unit I fully write over the drive 1 time. Should be 5 more hours. Something has occurred during the secure erase that was not expected. The card dropped its write speed a lot. I got to the 5tb write mark and speeds that flux from 200 to 250 and were and average of 240 are now down to 120- 150 and average of 137. I knew the drive would slow but it started at 5tb I went lower a chart as follows 0-3tb secure erase did about 230mb average speed. 3tb to 5tb a slow drop to about 180 mb write speed 5tb to 6.9tb a drop to about 137mb write speed Translation this drive is going to slower then you think as you fill it. I have written about 6.86 tb of zeros on the secure erase in just about 11 hours. that is about 600gb an hour average speed. and when I did the first 3tb i averaged close to 1tb an hour. this is a bigger drop then I thought would happen. So bear in mind that filling it slows it. I am at half the speed I was in the beginning with just about 1 tb to go. Which I am sure will drop more. So it took 13 hours to zero erase the drive about 600gb an hour and the last 3tb of this drive the speed are well under 200mb as low as 125mb near the end. What does this mean to you? If you are storing movies eyetv recordings or any long files I would partition this drive into 5tb and 3tb. the first 5tb section would be faster the second 3tb section would be slower. So if you have 4k recordings put them in the 5tb partition and if you have 2k recordings use the second 3tb section. That will overcome any drop off of speed for the most part. I have cloned a 500gb 10.10.5 os from my mac mini onto it and using an external usb 3.0 enclosure ran it as a booter /os for 1 day it ran fairly well. That clone took around 2 hours. I then pulled it and dropped it into a thunderbolt case and if worked better as the boot drive. This would be a very nice ht/dvr hdd in a mac using a thunderbolt case. Lastly I am running it as a Time Machine in a thunderbolt case. I did some testing and it was pretty good at that function If you are a mac guy this is a nice piece of ear. I would like 4 of these and use them with the dock below https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=0VN-0003-000W6

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: 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: - 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: - 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!