Toshiba NAS N300 10TB HDD review - Introduction

Toshiba NAS N300 10TB HDD review

We review among the bigger HDDs available on the market these days, it is the Toshiba NAS N300 that as it implies is intended as 24/7 storage for your small home server or NAS. How well does it stack up against other HDDs, let's find out?

In this article, we take the new Toshiba N300 10TB for a spin (yeah that's a pun!), 10,000 GB and that makes it among the bigger single consumer unit storage device to date. However, Toshiba also offers this unit on 12 and 14 TB sizes, so that you know. The latest models all have a SATA600 interface, a speed of 7200 rpm and 256 MB of cache memory. It might not offer SSD performance, but it certainly isn't slow for NAS usage. It's the year 2019, it's big but with these massive HDD platters, will it be fast enough? 

The new model we are looking at today is based on eight platters while spinning at 7200 rpm. The N300 NAS and X300 models use Toshiba's advanced Stable Platter Technology to minimize vibrations by stabilizing the motor shaft at both ends for improved tracking accuracy and maximum performance during read and write operations. The N300 NAS models include rotational vibration (RV) sensors and are made to deliver sustained data transfer speeds up to 260 MB/s for 14 TB or up to 253 MB/s for 12 TB. With support for up to 8 HDD multi-RAID systems, the new N300 models are highly scalable to the users' NAS configurations as their data storage needs evolve and large amounts of data need to be efficiently stored and accessed daily.

The HDD uses 9.48 watts of power while in operation, and 7.15 Watts in IDLE. Seagate specifies a maximum 'throughput' and reads performance of 260 MB/s. Our tests will show how fast this storage sample really is in several scenarios. Before we begin, we still have to see the final price but early listing show roughly 299 euros for this unit, so that's actually 3 cents per gigabyte. The N300 NAS Hard Drive series is designed for use in high-performance personal, home office and small business network attached storage applications such as for scalable RAID systems. It is designed to be optimized for the performance, reliability and endurance requirements of 24/7 operation high-capacity storage and comes with a 3-year limited warranty.