30.11.2015

This is a review for a 1TB P300 Toshiba hard drive I received free-to-review via Amazon Vine. There used to be around 200 hard drive manufacturers and many have either gone under or merged (e.g. IBM hard drives division was sold to Hitachi who were later acquired by Western Digital and rivals Seagate acquired Samsung’s hard drive division in 2011). Now only three mainstream hard drive manufactures remain: Western Digital, Seagate and Toshiba, and the world spent 32 billion dollars on hard drive storage in 2013. Although these three companies assemble hard drives, they share many same components from external suppliers such as the motors that spin them round.And anything spinning at 7,200 rpm in the case of this P300 Toshiba drive is going to fail sometime,and if we are unlucky it will fail sooner rather than later. In fact around 8% of hard drives fail in the first year, significantly more than fail in the two subsequent years – largely due to manufacturing faults and rough handling at the warehouse and during delivery as 3.5” hard drives are very susceptible to knocks, far more so than 2.5” laptop drives that are specially toughened for mobile use. As well as reliability we also want speed, and generally hi-performance drives are less reliable than those specifically designed for reliability (i.e. NAS storage drives). Plus pay more and the number of years warranty’s increases, suggesting better reliability but in fact the extra cash may also be to cover replacements after failure (i.e. the higher price might be simply anti-failure ‘insurance’ to cover replacement costs rather than significantly improved reliability). The warranty for these 3.5” P300 ‘hi-performance’ 7,200 rpm Toshiba hard drives is two years, not bad, but nothing like the 5 year warranty I have on my Western Digital Black gaming hard drives I have now returned to after suspect reliability with a few of my Seagate Hybrid (SSHD)'s that had 3 year warranties – plus the 2.5” laptop version of these Toshiba drives (the L200) has a longer 3 year warranty. Backblaze in the USA monitor their 50 thousand hard drives and have found Toshiba a relatively reliable brand along with Hitachi HGST (still manufacturing independently of owners Western Digital at the moment), although capacity and hard drive model number also played an important part (the new 4TB drives in particular holding up well).Anyway practical upshot is that my Toshiba 1TB P300 hard drive performed quite well matching my WD Black for sequential write/read speeds but random 4k operations were relatively poor. In use I doubt you’d really notice much difference as I have my STEAM gaming files on a 4TB Seagate HSSD (as it was there first) and my photos and videos on the faster 4TB WD Black (and I am perfectly happy with the Chillblast PCs gaming performance – probably as the system C: drive is an uber fast 512GB Crucial SSD). So the P300 drive's OK as a secondary drive for gaming on a budget. Still as I got this Toshiba drive free-to-review I was limited to the 1TB, and that small size just isn’t large enough to waste time installing inside my main PC case – I’d always buy the 4, 5 or 6TB versions for internal use, deciding on which by cost per GB. Still this 1Tb Toshiba P300 works fine via USB3 and is more than speedy enough for file backup, so 4* (assuming it lasts many years). Like all 7,200rpm mechanical drives these Toshiba P300 drives can make an audible staccato noise as they rummage about.There's also the upmarket Toshiba X300 uber fast 7,200rpm drives for 'extreme gaming and graphics' which I would be tempted by as they are a tad cheaper in price to my WD Blacks (although they don't have the 5 year warranty of the blacks, it's still just 2 years). These days I avoid the likes of eco low power WD Greens and the Toshiba E300 hard drives as speed is more important than power saving when gaming and I can recover my STEAM account game files anytime by re-downloading them - seems daft having a power saving lethargic green hard drive that trims half a watt or so off the PCs power requirements when our gaming PC cases light up like Christmas trees, produce half a kilowatt of heat and are tapping their toes waiting for the next file to be read. So would I buy this Toshiba drive as it’s cheaper than the WD Black? Probably I’d still go for the Blacks as a mechanical hard drive as I find them reliable, fast enough, and I don’t buy hard drives that often. Although the WD Blacks now go to 6TB, the significantly cheaper 5TB Toshiba X300 is still tempting for gaming. However if the files on the drive are important, the WD Blacks include hardware like 'Corruption Protection Technology' (CPT) to minimise data corruption during power failure. For my external backup NAS system I’d stick to a special NAS drive designed for 24/7 operation as hard drive failure in a NAS raid is still best avoided, as rebuilding the RAID array doesn’t always go to plan. I would buy a Toshiba X300 in preference to a Seagate HSSD for gaming and this cheaper P300 type for backup data storage, as I have had those reliability problems with Seagate HSSDs (my backup drives sit idle stored offline in Orico hard drive protection boxes and so tend to last a long time as they aren’t spinning very often). However my failed Seagate HSSDs were early 2TB ones and I think they had particular teething problems, but that has made me wary of them. For home file backup (photos, videos, documents etc) I also use USB3 hard drive docking stations and hard drive quick-swap enclosures to slip bare drives in and out for file transfer, and we have an Netgear 8TB RAID NAS server attached to the router.

22.4.2017

Once upon a time... hard drives were easy and straightforward. When capacities were limited and your only worry tended to be if you needed a 3.5" or 2.5" drive. Like most things in computing things have evolved. With terms like Solid State Drive, NAS, RAID and JBOD to name just a few (not to forget some hard drives being released in different colours to denote different functions) sometimes you have to really think hard about what (hard) drive would meet your needs.What is on offer here is the "Toshiba N300 H4TB Internal Hard Drive" with SATA connection and 3.5" form factor. This drive has been designed and developed to offer "High Reliability and Scalability" when in an always-on environment as part of a NAS/RAID set up.However at the same time there is nothing stopping you using this drive as a standalone or like myself in single drive external enclosure. If you do intend to use it for the designed purpose then on offer to temp you is the Integrated RV Sensor, a high durability and heat reduction design, not to forget that large 128MB Cache. The RV Sensor is what makes it ideal for a NAS environment as minimising vibrations and any shocks would reduce the risk of malfunction and damage (especially in a multi-bay system).As build quality goes it would be hard to improve on anything here. It really is a solidly built drive that came very well packaged through the post. However one of the major failings seems to be the warranty. As several reviewers have mentioned the drive comes with a short warranty and there seems to be a bit of confusion on how long the warranty lasts with several quoting different time scales. The drive that I received contained paperwork stating that it is covered with a 1-year guarantee. To me this seems very short considering that the drive is designed for constant and long term use. Other harddrives come with up to a 5 year warranty (some even longer) so it strikes me as strange that this "premium" drive would fall short in this area. It may be worth looking into and it would be good if Toshiba could clarify it either on their website or elsewhere. Personally however I am expecting (and hoping) this drive to last a lot longer than a year.In terms of capacity 4Tb is the perfect size for most if not all users. Even if used in RAID there is plenty of storage space (just remember to pair it with an identical drive). Larger drives are on the market but the price increases sharply (almost doubling from 4 to 6Tb) so a pair of smaller drives could work out more economical depending on your needs. Installation of the drive was simple and straightforward, I initially had the drive inside my computer where it was recognized without any problems, before I formatted and got it ready for life in an enclosure. Several have mentioned problems getting the drive detected however I suspect that the problem lies with them or their BIOS/operating system and not the drive itself. Performance over the USB3.1 interface was very fast - likely the fastest I've seen in an external drive to date with the exception of the solid state drives (but not a huge distance behind). I doubt anyone would have any problems when it comes to this drive performing.I have read online and looked at a few benchmarks showing that this drive is slightly slower for many tasks when compared to the "Seagate IronWolf 4 TB" and the "Western Digital 4TB Intellipower" however it is £10-£25 pounds cheaper that both of them so in my books a slightly slower read and write speed is forgivable.The only thing that worries me ever so slightly is the question mark over warranty. Like I said the build quality is high, the performance is good and the bangs per buck and gigabytes per pound cannot be faulted. The confusions over the warranty and the (to be honest) ugly label on the drive itself is the only thing holding it back. If Toshiba could address this then it would help this drive stand out from the others on the market.Either way I doubt this drive will give you any problems...

21.1.2020

So I got mine (4tb) back in early 2018, and at time of writing (early 2020), I have to say I've had 0 issues with it.The short summary:Pros:-Big-Cheap for what it is-No real noticeable lag. It's a little slower than my laptop's SSD, but you'd be getting an SSD 4x smaller for the same-installation is bog standard HDD installationpriceCons:-Rattles a bit when in a lot of use (not something that bothers me)-Some people have reported problems (can't speak for them, 2 years, no issues)-Sticker doesn't match my PC's internal colour scheme (mileage may vary)Here is what I think:When it says "for professionals", that's probably one of the key things you want to consider. Ultimately,this drive is loud as hell as far as drives go. When idling, it doesn't really make a lot of noise, but do anything with it, and it's like someone's tinkering with an old lawnmower (it's a switched off lawn mower, but very echoey and in a garage next door). Now. Being an hardcore e?️ic gamer, much of the time, I have my speakers on (or headphones if you're a headphone person). So when I'm using this, it's because I'm playing a game, and as such, I can't hear it once the game has started, due to other noises going on. You've got to square this away yourself really. I find computer noises relaxing, so a little rattling from under my desk doesn't rattle me, but if you're honestly bothered by that, then it's not for you. Reviews I read before purchasing appeared to suggest it was mainly built as a budget dedicated server option, and considering many people I know don't in fact want 300+ games installed at a time, that seems about right. So just remember. You're getting good performance, and big size out of a fairly cheap drive (as far as relatively high speed drives go). The concession is a little noise occasionally, or a lot if you're a habitual ctrl+s person, and you're working with blender or something, then a little noise a lot. I use a different drive for my art stuff though, and word documents and code go to the cloud, so these are not use cases I can really report back about.It was easy to install, it's literally just a bog standard hard drive installation. I can't remember if I had to format it, but it's not my OS drive, and if it was, it still wouldn't matter, because ultimately, when you set up from scratch, the installation wizard gives you an option to do it as far as I can remember. The main take away here though, is that the installation process was problem free enough that after 2 years, my main stick out memory of buying this was thinking I got a good deal on 4tb, and now I return, because I only have 25ish gb left. Should I uninstall some games? Hell no. Get back in the bin with your terrible advice.I can't speak for the 1 star reviews. Ultimately, if the drives are failing after months or a year in those cases, then that sucks, and that's a legitimate complaint. However, I can't speak for them because of the fact that mine has lasted 2 years now with not a single issue and a higher than average amount of moving my desktop from place to place. With any product you buy, you're rolling the dice, and there's a certain probability you will get a dud, but I honestly cannot recommend this enough. Especially considering that I use this probably about 8-9 hours a day at the best times. I've really put this through its paces, and mucked about with partitioning, and it's been pretty solid.

3.7.2016

I bought a couple of these to replace some 2TB Seagates that live in my PC and have spent the last three years storing and serving up my music and film collection via Plex. It's fair to say that the Seagates have had a hard life and so when one gave up after a power cut last week, I decided to replace them both. These P300s seem to be a fairly recent addition to the Toshiba catalogue which may explain why there isn't much online about their longevity. Nevertheless, at the price I thought I'd take a punt and having them set up in a RAID1 configuration, just as it was with the Seagates, I'd have to be a really Unlucky Alf to lose any data in the event of a failure....Anyway,the disks arrived on time and well packed (each in its own bag, in its own padded box, and then each box in a slightly bigger padded Amazon box). No problem with any of that.I've attached a picture of the label on one of the drives. These are from the HDWD range which, according to the Toshiba website, has a two year warranty. Both the drives I bought were manufactured in April 2016. Installation was unremarkable. The BIOS on my Gigabyte motherboard created the RAID array for me, and I activated the resulting "disk" in the Disk Management area. Windows 10 is quite happy with the arrangement. I then transferred about 1.8TB of data from the remaining Seagate. I could probably have done this by a simple copy and paste, but I didn't want Plex to notice that anything had changed (my concern being that Plex might do a total refresh of my library and lose some of the labelling and artwork I had added). So, instead I used AOEMI Partition to duplicate the existing partition from the remaining Seagate. I mention that here because it meant that within a few minutes of being installed, the P300s were put to work writing 1.8TB of data. I left the operation to complete overnight which it did with no issues at all. I ran a disk check today and everything is sweet. The only other observation I can make right now is that contrary to some other reviews, I have found that these disks are very quiet in operation. The old Seagates were quiet too, although they could just be heard if doing a defrag in the dead of night, for example. For me, the P300s seem to make no noise at all. It may be, then, that much depends on the way in which the disks are installed or what they are installed in - my tower has machined aluminium internals). And that's about as much as I can say right now.UPDATE March 2017:So, I've had these drives in my tower for six months or so. My tower functions solely as a Plex server and due to the strange nocturnal habits of my friends, runs 24/7. The P300s haven't missed a beat and a recent disk check confirms all is well.UPDATE June 2019Possibly tempting fate, but these two drives are still going strong in my 24/7 Plex server. Unfortunately they are getting a bit full so it will soon be time to refresh my set-up and get some larger capacity drives. But more than three years without a hiccup is quite impressive!

12.7.2020

I have been buying and building computers since the IBM 286 (1 meg ram) costing over a £1,000 was the cutting edge technology, I had a 40 Meg drive in it and that was considered to be so large you would never fill it, and to replace was well over £200. Things have certainly moved on and buying a fast 4TB platter drive for £95 was unimaginable then, now paying £23.75p a Tb means that 40 meg drive would have cost £3.80 today, clearly Moores law is as relevant today as it was in 1965 with all things technology based. Anyway less history and down to reviewing the drive. Its fast for a non SSD drive being helped by the 7200 rpm platter and the 128 meg buffer.The product details on Amazon are very basic and even incorrect stating its a Solid State Hard Drive which clearly it isn't, check out the Toshiba website for the specs and there are some great reviews on-line. My Mobo is 8 years old so I wasn't sure how easy it would be to partition and format this drive. I decided to structure the partition as GPT which went very smoothly without a hitch and format it NTFS which also went very smoothly, my system is Windows 10 64 bit pro. The Drive formatted to 3.6 tb which is correct for a 4tb HD. Interestingly I copied over 900 meg from my 1TB WD Caviar Black drive (7200 rpm platter and 64 meg buffer) and it only occupied approx 650 meg space on the new drive. I triple checked this was correct and it was, all files had been copied no hidden files missed, I know the drives storage is more efficient but I didn't expect that efficient. I have tested the drive and it is about 30% faster than the Caviar but obviously not as fast as my SSD's. Its quiet, well made, it doesn't hesitate to spin up when accessed and will be the main storage for all my big files/directories and games that don't need to be on an SSD. I have no intention to use it as a boot disc, although it would be fine if your mobo can boot to it, just not as fast as an SSD. It arrived in the Toshiba packaging which is great not OEM packaging as some reviewers mention. Finally there have been some negative reviews and some very positive reviews but tbh that will be the case with all makes of drive and I have used all makes over the years, e.g. my 1TB WD Caviar Black considered the fastest and most reliable HD possible at the time, has negative reviews but mine has been faultless for over 6 years of constant use. So don't worry about this drive,perhaps a slight niggle is the 2 year warranty, 3 or 5 would have been nice but it is what it is. I very happy with it, as long as its reliable and only time will tell, I see no reason why it wont be my main storage until SSD 4tb drives are as cheap as chips. So yes, its recommended by me and if I do run into issues at a later date I will update this review.

9.4.2019

My intention was to buy two 8TB drives (one in a PC where noise mattered and a backup where noise didn't matter), but given some of the other review comments about noise, I thought I'd only buy one of these for now to see what the noise was like.Had this running for a day now with some observations:-When installing via a USB to SATA adaptor (thought I'd try it externally first before fitting into a machine), it only detects about 1TB of data. I was a bit worried but it's fine once installed internally into a machine's SATA port, which would then see the full 8TB. I formatted as GPT rather than MBR.ProsGreat storage capacity for the money (bought significantly cheaper than other 8TB drives,

5.12.2015

Who buys an old-fashioned Hard Disk Drive (HDDs) nowadays, with Solid-State Drives (SSDs) becoming all the rage? Well, it's still much cheaper to buy an HDD than an SSD, so although the writing is on the wall, there's a place for them yet in desktop computers.I've previously used a Western Digital Blue 1TB HDD as my system disk. In terms of performance, this drive is pretty much identical, which is to say it is fast. The 7,200 RPM rotation speed means faster access to disk sectors, and the burst transfer rate of 6Gbit/s (600 MB per second) is good (I believe this equates to the SATA 3.0 standard, and will only work at this speed if your motherboard supports it).

14.8.2017

I am running this on a windows machine I use as a Plex server.In order to benchmark the drive I ran Crystal Mark twice, both with similar results. It gave me sequential read 210MB/s sequential write speed of 207MB/s. The attached image shows all the tested parameters.To replicate this to see how it fared in the real work, I copied a 13.6GB between the drive and an SSD drive (Samsung 840 Pro), with between 190-200MB/s transfer speed in both directions. I did not see any drop off of speed during the transfer. By way of comparison, this is noticeably faster than the other (NAS specific) Seagate HDD's on my rig which give about 90MB read and sustained 80MB/s write.I have never had a Toshiba HDD before,

21.8.2016

Fast performance, time will tell if they also have endurance.I have installed two of the 4TB versions in a RAID 0, in a Terramaster D2-310 USB 3.1 enclosure, connected to a 2013 27" iMac directly to a USB 3.0 port. I'm getting 350-400MB/s reads and writes with Black Magic Disk Test. Excellent for a couple of spinning drives.They are pretty silent for a 7200rpm/128MB cache performance drive - they have some weird "clonk" sounds once in a while when running, not sure what that is (probably the heads moving or parking), but this is supposedly normal, according to other reviews. No issue though, once you get used to how they sound, you won't notice it anymore.They also stay pretty cool for what they are.

15.2.2018

This now serves as the bulk storage drive on my PC. I'm running the OS from a separate SSD so can't comment on how it performs as a boot drive. For the purpose I'm using it for, storage of large amounts of mixed files including video's, music, games, it's perfect, and pretty cost effective on a price per Tb basis. I considered this drive against a few others like the cheaper Seagate Barracuda and WD Blue, but decided on the 5 Tb version of the X300, because it should be faster (being a 7200 rpm drive) and it offered a little more storage, for a small amount of extra money. They also make 4 and 6 Tb versions. Seagate and WD both make 7200 rpm drives in the large capacities (Barracuda Pro and WD Black respectively)

12.5.2016

So far so good!. Been using it three weeks and it has been working perfectly. No problems at all. It was recognised straight away in BIOS and in W10 programs and hardware section (you have to format this HDD before you can use it). It is very fast and transferring files is notably quicker than my other (Western Digital) 4TB HDD. This is due to the 128MB cache (whereas other HDD's have 64MB cache). I was initially capitulating because of mixed reviews for this HDD. In fact, my HDD came from Amazon France and in the past I have had bad experiences from Amazon EU Sarl as I was receiving items that were either customer returns or refurbished. However, this time around I received a brand new and unopened/unused item.

27.11.2015

The drive is described as high performance 7,200 rpm drives with 64 MB data buffer and SATA 6 Gbit/s which is SATA 3 equivalent.If you are installing this as a secondary drive in a desktop PC you may find your motherboard is not SATA3 but backwards compatibility ensures it will still work. Mechanical drives of this description will probably not seem any faster and if it is speed you want then a costly SSD (solid state drive) is what you need to notice a performance boost.This is supplied as an OEM package for PC builders so don't expect fancy packaging or instruction manuals.If you fit it to a Windows PC as a secondary drive and open "This PC" or "My Computer" the drive will not show initially.You

24.5.2020

I bought four of these for a NAS after extensive research. In terms of what's on the spec sheet, they blow the usual competition for NAS storage drives out of the water. They're cheaper, have lower URE rates, and very respectable MTBF times et al. I ran them for a month problem free, so while not long enough to get a true idea of review, I got a feel for their general characteristics in operation.In reviewing which drives to go for, something I hadn't bothered to take heed of is how noisy the drives would be. The first time I powered up the NAS in my living room I couldn't believe how noisy four of these operating at once were.

14.10.2019

*** Update ~ six months inI now have four 4TB N300 drives running across my two active NAS servers (the DS1019+ and 412+), and so far they have been running flawlessly. They seem to run around 2-3 degrees cooler than the 4TB HGST drives they are now mostly paired with (39-40 degrees, vs. 42-43 for the HGSTs), though obviously a bit warmer than the remaining 5400rpm Seagate drive (at 36 degrees).*** Original reviewI previously used a mix of 7200rpm HGST and 5x00rpm Seagate NAS drives and Samsung EcoGreen ones in my NAS servers (Synology DS1019+, 412+ and an older QNAP TS-210). These have replaced the Samsung ones,

7.5.2017

The drive came in a retail box, with thick air cushion all around the drive inside the sturdy box.I installed this into a Synology NAS case, which was installed in no time, it's a standard 3.5" SATA drive, so if you have fitted one before then you will have no problem with this.I tested the transfer speed against my old 2TB drive that was inside the same NAS case, and the old 2TB drive was ever slightly faster (maybe around 5% faster), which you expect as fewer sectors to navigate the head over. This drive does sound slightly louder in use, but I got used to it fairly quickly and I don't notice it anymore.The drive is designed to be used in a NAS environment,

Toshiba S300 - Reviews

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