TOSHIBA X300 HDWR21CXZSTA 12TB 7200 RPM 256MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive

Pros: Updated 6/6/18 Eight months in now lots of windows TV files coming and going. Not a peep. With proper mounting its not noisy at all. Storage is still dropping in price. Unreal Market Driven model. ---------------------------- Lots of storage. Remember folks, small files take up more room due to overhead and sector size then big ones, so with a full 8tb partition, you’ll get more bang for your buck by using it for larger files ( like recorded TV!) and that’s exactly what this drive is doing. With THAT much space I can record my favorite cable channel 12 hours a day, so now I never have to watch a commercial. My TV rig never has overheating problems, so no worries about running this drive 24/7. Toshiba makes a 24/7 model with an “N” prefix. Longer warranty as well (two years on the X drive Three years on the N series drive. As I’ve mentioned in previous drive reviews, I prefer drives with a five year warranty. “Just because” this shows me the vendor has confidence in their product. Not that a five year old drive will be worth all that much as the capacity will seem comical in five years.

Cons: While I don't consider a two year warranty a "con" so to speak, there are better warranties out there..and worse. “Retail packaging” might trick you into believing there will be mounting hardware and a cable in there, but alas there was none. Outside of silliness “just because” cons...., the drive spun up, formatted, read and wrote data for a solid week without so much as a raised eyebrow over anything. Didn’t make enough white noise to be considered a sleep aid. The fans on my water cooling system remain the loudest thing my PC does, the TV rig has a pack of fans to keep everything cool. When the TV is on, can’t tell.

Overall Review: Performance seemed average to me, I don’t bother with benchmarks much, there are so many motherboards and configurations around now results can vary considerably. I managed 150-200 mbs which is what I typically see on drive to drive copying on large files on my Gigabyte/i7 2011-v3/32gb/w64/system, my TV system is a bit less study for today’s games, but in its prime it was right there with its i5 and EVGA Z68 MB. OK it did show 200mb/s on one of the popular benchmark products. Copying a 20GB movie gave the same result. Small files show a far higher burst rate, due to the generous cache supplied. At a bit over $31 bucks a TB, it’s just an average deal these days with larger capacity drives at the same price/TB, now it turns to a question of how many drives your system can support. I can’t go nutso as I went with a "barely there" power supply on my newest rig, but the system is still holding its own. This drive replaced an aging 2tb Seagate that was on its last spare sector, so I retired it. The 8tb unit didn’t overload the power supply on spin up, but I have to be really close now that all of my drives have grown ( except the ssd system drive) as my TV collection gets bigger by the month. For the first month or two on a very large drive you really don’t want to trust it with important data until it’s proven itself. That’s where I am. In a month or two of heavy duty TV recording and running backups to it every other day, this drive will have pretty much proven itself and be ready for more important things ( like my 20 year collection of digital pictures) I always said...If I could just get a 1TB drive, life would be sweet. Then it went to 2tb, then to 4tb and so on. As storage marches up, please keep in mind you need at least two copies of really important stuff, regardless of the cost. Consumer data value exceeds $1000 a GB these days! Think about. For a few hundred bucks, you can keep two copies of your most precious digital data. One of them in the bank box. The Toshiba is a good start to consolidate your data, with its cavernous capacity ( 7.27 TB with NTFS format on a single partition) and monstrous 128MB cache. Most drives in this class have this size cache..yup it’s big. I’ll rate the X300 4 eggs now simply because there is room to improve (I'll have to give a nod to Seagate on their clever re-branding of their drives..calling anything an "X" these days is kinda laughable ( oh right . "Iphone "X") . I’ll be back in a few months to update with news good or bad. In my experience drives that can survive the first couple of weeks at my place tend to last. We’ll see how this drive does down the road a bit. We’ll be laughing at the measly 8TB capacity soon enough. A major player in the drive market has announced tech that will get us to 40TB on a spinning platter drive..within 5 years. Take advantage now to protect what you have, the stakes go both up and down in the next five years. More stuff to save, more stuff to lose, but the price per TB of stuff will certainly continue to fall. About me?-twenty five + years in high tech, starting from the age where getting something to print from a PC was a major act of jedi-hackerness and hard shelled floppies and the Web were not even invented yet. I've been an EggXpert reviewer since 2013

Pros: -Good Performance, nice to have a 128MB cache -Value at $0.032/GB -Packaging is very secure. Shaped bubble wrap keeps it safe and easy to reuse -Quiet. I haven't heard any of that normal hdd churning sound Crystal Disk 6.0 Benchmark (read / write MB/s) 100MB Seq Q32T1 215 / 205 4K Q8T8 55 / 2.5 4K Q32T1 56 / 2.5 4K Q1T1 54 / 2.3 500MB Seq Q32T1 219 / 218 4K Q8T8 1.9 / 2.1 4K Q32T1 2.0 / 2.0 4K Q1T1 0.9 / 2.0 1GB Seq Q32T1 220 / 219 4K Q8T8 2.1 / 2.1 4K Q32T1 2.0 / 2.0 4K Q1T1 0.8 / 2.1

Cons: -Short warranty. For a little more money, you could get a 5yr warranty from a competitor

Overall Review: Others reported this drive running hot but I did not have that experience. I'm using an open air chassis.

Pros: Very quiet drive – one of the quietest drives I’ve owned and much quieter than I was expecting considering the size of the drive Great sustained transfer speeds – 200+ MB/s Easily besting almost every HDD I own (next fastest drive I have is ~150 MB/s) Positioned as a game/performance drive and fills this role well. This drive isn't suitable for NAS or surveillance use (see cons - heat) Perfect for storing all the steam games that you bought on sale and have never played yet :P (and for playing the games you actually bought to play)

Cons: I’m sure it is already mentioned, but this drive does get warm. This is the cost of the great performance this drive has. What’s troubling is the industry standard 2 year warranty. This is just what the industry deemed was acceptable, not much anyone can do about it. The heat that this drive generates means that attention to airflow will be important with placement. The fact that this drive gets warm doesn’t mean that the drive will fail more often than any other drive – long term use and reliability is something that is beyond the scope of a review. I wouldn't use this drive for NAS or surveillance, this is a drive built for performance and gaming use.

Overall Review: It is possible to have good enough air flow (utilizing fan controllers on your case fans) and keep this drive cool enough to not offset how quiet it is if you are looking for a large performance HDD for a reasonably quiet build. Recommended for anyone needing 6TB of storage for gaming (anyone with a very extensive steam library).

Pros: The quietest idle from any hard drive I’ve ever tested. Almost no vibration which is great for the drives longevity and its effect on other drives in your system. The 128 MB cache on this drives help push its performance to it the extreme for a 4TB mechanical hard drive. Below are benchmark results from testing this drive: ATTO • Read = 193.11 MB/s • Write = 193.34 MB/s Crystal Disk Mark • Seq QD32: Read = 197.7 MB/s, Write = 195.8 MB/s • 4k QD32: Read = 56.92 MB/s, Write = 2.512 MB/s • Sequential: Read = 198.6 MB/s, Write = 195.9 MB/s • 4k: Read = 6.684 MB/s, Write = 2.398 MB/s • 4k QD32: Read = 13,721 IOPS Write = 641.6 IOPS • 4k: Read = 1,653.4 IOPS Write = 587.9 IOPS HD Tune • Minimum: 90.0 MB/s • Maximum: 196.8 MB/s • Average: 150.2 MB/s • Access Time: 12.1 ms • Burst Rate: 320.9 MB/s Power Consumption • Idle Drive Off = 0.85 Watts • Idle Drive On = 5.95 Watts • Load Read = 9.55 Watts • Load Write = 9.85 Watts

Cons: Temperatures during all benchmarks were higher than expected as the highest it hit was 102.2 °F during testing. The reason for this to be considered high is due to it being in a very well vented area during its evaluation and not in a case as well. This number would rise quite a bit in case unless you give this drive some serious airflow.

Overall Review: Overall this is a fantastic hard drive with exceptional performance all while staying extremely silent during any operation. This does come at the small cost of slightly higher drive temperatures but it’s not enough to overshadow everything else about this drive that makes it a smart buy. If you need some large and fast data storage on the cheap, this drive is perfect. *All tests were conducted three times to ensure accuracy and repeatability of results.

Pros: This 4TB drive runs at 7200RPM. Average test speeds are decent at 192MB/s write and 196MB/s read. I've had this drive for about half a year and it still runs well.

Cons: none

Pros: Storage capacity, Buffer size, Performance with large files, 7200rpm

Cons: Weight? much heavier than any other drives I have had, but then again it IS a 6TB drive.

Overall Review: Although I do not get the test numbers that the manufacturers test data claims, (I very seldom do). Difference in equipment is sure to be the cause, that being said… this drive is no slouch. The 128MB buffer is just the ticket for those large graphics files. Although I am not a gamer I am an artist and work with very large graphics files with The Gimp and Inkscape to name a couple and the loading times are far better with this drive than any of the drives I have had in the past, even the boot time is nearing the range of some of the SSD’s I have used. Using the GPT partition table to make use of the full 6GB, I proceeded to do a full installation of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS 64-bit and once up and running on the new system I was very pleased with the performance of this drive. There are features found in this drive that other desktop drives do not normally have that are aimed at performance, especially for gaming. This drive far outperforms the 2.0TB competitor I am currently using in this machine and I will likely clone my existing drive over to this one to take advantage of the increased performance. No real Con’s or peculiarities noted during my testing of this drive, it is rather heavy, but it is a 6GB drive after all… As with any drive, longevity will be the ultimate test… but at this point I would certainly have no issues recommending this drive to anyone wanting to boost their storage capacity or performance. So far I have not noticed any temperatures that others have noted in other reviews. This drive has been running a cool 90 to 100 Deg F over the week that it has been in use so far, even during the transfer of nearly 1TB of movies onto the drive... perhaps my case has better airflow around the drive? The machine used for the test was an HP-Elite Memory 16.0 GiB Processor Intel Core i5 CPU 650 @ 3.20GHz x 4 Graphics Intel Ironlake Desktop I ran the Benchmark test twice with little of any difference between them; Sample size : 10.0 MiB Average Read Rate : 176.6 MB/s (100 samples) Average Write Rate: 109.9 MB/s (100 samples) Average Access Time: 11.94 msec (1000 samples)

Pros: Working with the Toshiba X300 6TB drive has been a pleasure, since I received it. It arrived well packaged in a box with an inflated cushion snugly fit around the drive, and it looked like it was well protected during shipping. As this drive is marketed as a desktop and gaming drive and not necessarily as a boot drive, I decided to test it in an external USB 3.0 chassis and compared it to another brand's "mainstream" 5400 rpm line of drives. Right away, the drive's 7200 rpm speed became noticeable. The drive was across the board 50-70% faster than the 5400 rpm drive, with sequential read speeds averaging around 184 MB/s and sequential write speeds around 159 MB/s. Random reads were almost double the 5400 rpm drive's numbers, coming in at .769 MB/s, and random writes were more than double the slower drive's speed, at 1.825 MB/s. For any drive used in this particular USB chassis, these are great numbers. Placing this drive in a case directly attached to a SATA port would give better numbers of course, but I came away from my testing quite impressed with the performance this drive was capable of over USB 3.0. During testing, the biggest surprise was how quiet the drive was. Even during heavy use, the drive was almost completely silent. At one point I ended up touching the drive to feel if it was warm, just to see if it was still powered on. The quiet operation is going to be especially nice since this drive will make its permanent home in that external USB chassis, and I think that gamers using this drive in any external case will be quite pleased with it.

Cons: The drive did not come with the usual 4 mounting screws, which could put your build on hold if you don't have extras in your parts bin. I always prefer to see low-profile flat head screws included with a drive just to make sure I'm using ones with the correct threads.

Overall Review: The drive runs a little warm, so be sure to use some sort of cooling with this drive. It is totally normal for a 7200 rpm to run warm so this isn't really a Con, however just realize that if you stick this drive into a small case without some sort of airflow over it, you could really cook it. Considering the relatively short warranty, this is not a drive you want to permit to run hot all the time. A metal external chassis that would help act as a heatsink, or one with a small fan for cooling, would be preferable over a plastic case that doesn't do anything to keep the drive cool. Letting the drive power down when not in use would also help avoid cooking this drive unnecessarily, if active cooling is not an option. Again, this isn't a mark against this drive because any high performance 7200 rpm drive will run warmer than other slower drives. All things considered, I really like this hard drive. The performance is right up there with competing brands, yet it was also one of the quietest drives I've had in a long time which gives this drive an edge. Any of the available sizes would make for great game or media storage, so I recommend this drive for anyone needing a bunch of storage space and 7200 rpm transfer speeds.

Pros: Great price, huge. I've used a bunch of Toshiba hard drives recently, and had zero problems. Apparently, Toshiba 3.5 inch drives have an interesting back story. Back in the day, IBM made hard drives, they merged with Hitachi to form HGST, who was subsequently bought by Western Digital. A short time after, WD sold off some of their 3.5 inch production assets to Toshiba. Does that make this drive an ibm-hitachi-hgst-wd-toshiba? So at the very least, there is some pedigree in here somewhere. The 6TB version as a huge 128mb cache which really makes this seem lively. Sustained transfer speeds are respectable, too, right where they should be for a modern 7200 rpm drive. Retail packaging is great, drive is very well protected for shipping.

Cons: Power consumption is higher than a typical NAS or similar drive, which is to be expected. This drive is intended to be used, not sit around all day twiddling its thumbs. And no fooling, the drive is big and heavy -- making full use of 3.5 inch format. Internet says 6 1TB platters..or is that sides? Warranty is 2 years. Some competitors have 5 year warranty for their performance drives.

Overall Review: With spinners, big is the only way to go. I don't think I'll ever buy another mechanical hard drive less than 4 TB. The sweet spot in terms of $ per TB seems to be around 6 TB at $30/per these days, and the 10TB being a bit more. Where you might quibble is in deciding whether to get a performance HDD or more of a NAS drive. NAS drives might be slower in transfer, but are designed to be run 24x7. So if you don't need the performance of this drive, you might choose a NAS optimized drive. If your main drive is a SSD, and you need a big drive mainly for long term storage (movies, pictures), I guess i would shop on price and brand. And I'm pretty comfortable these days with Toshiba drives.