StorageReview is pretty much it. Tom's occasionally reviews them, but I agree. It seems the focus is on SSD's. I guess I get it, since SSD's have more performance variables (buying the wrong SSD is far more detrimental to buying the wrong HDD...unless you are buying a Seagate HDD)
I think the last HDD review I read was around the time SMR came around. Hasn't been much since except for the articles discussing consolidation in the industry.
Are these Toshiba drives engineered entirely in-house or do they use IP from another manufacturer?
I've lately been sticking with WD to get as close to Hitachi IP as possible. WD was always my second choice anyway. I've had so much inconsistency with Seagate across the board over the last 7-8 years that I've just been avoiding them recently.
And what happened to Fujistu? I know Samsung was acquired by Seagate (as was Maxtor a decade ago) but do we realistically still have 3 players in the spinning glass field? For some reason I thought WD and Seagate were all that was left? I mean WD even owns Sandisk now, right?
Apparently (I was too lazy to do more than a quick search) Fujitsu sold their HDD business to Toshiba, so the drive here might have some Fujitsu pedigree in it.
Toshiba got production and some IP from Hitachi. When WD purchased them they had to spin some of it off. The rest seems to be from Fujistu. But pretty much anything from those on has been in house (probably Fujistu engineers).
You can find bad reviews for anything. I have 11 X300 4TB drives in my media server, most of which have been in operation 24x7 since January of last year. These drives are unbeatable at the price.
"Toshiba...says that they feature perpendicular magnetic recording and thus the drive has predictable performance and behavior."
As far as I know, every disk drive on the market uses perpendicular magnetic recording. Probably what Toshiba means here is that they don't use shingled magnetic recording, where tracks overlap and writing a sector can require multiple passes.
It was noteworthy for them to mention in the article. I believe Seagate is the only one using SMR, but there is no reason not to believe others wont follow at some point. Although I hope they don't. It's one of the most ghetto ways to increase storage density next to outright compression.
It's a desktop drive. It isn't like you need to be limited to one drive like most laptops. At $260, you could be comparing it to a RAID5 system (you would have had to have bought 3 hitachi 4T drives last week to beat it. Doesn't look like any such system today on pcpartpicker will match $260.
This will certainly make sense in anything artificially constrained like NAS boxes or existing (especially government) contracts, and expect an inflated price for that. But don't buy it if you just want storage.
I've always felt long warranties for storage mediums are irrelevant.
A) They don't cover data loss. B) Storage devices lose value faster than any other component in a PC (except perhaps a GPU) due to their YoY improvements in technology and cost reduction. C) Many people replace storage mediums before other components anyway D) The average life of a PC platform is 3 years. However, I concede, the average warranty of an internal hard drive is 2 years. E) Most PC components have warranties between 1-3 years. Rarely are they longer.
Occasionally you see ridiculous warranty periods from PSU and SSD manufactures (like Samsungs' 10 year warranty) but they are mostly gimmicks. The last time I used a warranty was on a PC Power & Cooling PSU which was 5 years old. They couldn't repair it (because OCZ shut down the Oceanside, CA facility shortly after their acquisition) and no longer had the same 750QUAD model in inventory so they replaced it with an EliteXtreme 800-watt unit, which is a piece of crap.
Go ahead and mail Samsung a failed 840 PRO and you will likely get back an 850 EVO. At first that seems like an improvement, but on paper you are actually losing features and consistency. I don't even know if Samsung manufactures planar MLC anymore to be able to make an 840 PRO.
I don't think most of your points really apply that well to HDDs anymore. The tech is evolving extremely slowly and even capacity isn't going up that fast anymore, so I don't see a big YoY improvement. Closely linked to that, I would argue that as a result of that they tend to be in use for far longer then performance-critical components.
I agree. Mechanical drives are no longer apart of the upgrade cycle because rarely are there any real breakthroughs. I also think this article is trash for not comparing HGST drives, which are my personal favorite. Having said all that, SSDs have been gradually increasing in price as NAND supply decreases... If I'm going to pay overpriced NAND prices, I'd rather buy a NVME drive instead. And while these prices are great on toshiba drives, the warranty makes it useless. Who buys a mass storage solution with a 2 year warranty? Most competitors are providing a 3 or 5 year warranty.
Yeah, the reason I bought my last 2 hard drives wasn't because I was running out of capacity but because I had to replace failing drives, and both times the drives were only a few months out of warranty.
Back when I was actually upgrading drives regularly, I was upgrading to 200-400% the capacity for around $100-120 every 2 years, today you're lucky if you can add 20% capacity for twice that price in 3-4 years. The useful service life of drives is just way longer now, so they need to hold up mechanically and a 2 year warranty doesn't inspire confidence.
A) Backups. At least for data that isn't easily replaced. B) We're talking HDDs. Snail pace. C) I'd bet GPUs get replaced more often and even RAM probably gets upgraded about as often as storage, at least HDDs such as the one in the article. D) All the more reason to want 3+ year warranties E) I avoid brands that have crap warranties. Have been burned on both HDDs and GPUs.
Unrelated to the HDD article, but Samsung should replace an 840 Pro with an 850 Pro. However, even IF they gave you an 850 Evo, that's still an upgrade over the 840 Pro... plus it would be a new drive at no cost. Much better than simply "Oh well that had a 1 year warranty because warranties for storage are irrelevant, so you're boned". WD's warranties in particular have come in handy with a few systems, including a personal Raptor (the replacement was a better model too).
So yeah... I'd like at least 3 years warranty, even on storage. Warranties don't take the place of good product quality, but since we as consumers can't always predict the reliability of a given purchase, they give us a safety net and potentially save us some cash down the road.
Importantly, longer warranties give manufacturers motivation to test their designs better for longer wear to avoid being burned on warranty costs. A short warranty simply means even manufacturer itself thinks the products are going to fail en masse.
Well, yes and no. In some cases you can extrapolate your expected failure rate as the drives age, and adjust warranty vs. pricing. For example let's say you have entry-level Aqua series and higher-perfomance Charcoal series drives, they have the same failure rates, but you want the premium drive to look even more appealing on paper. You can boost the warranty on the Charcoal and make sure retail pricing is adjusted accordingly to cover the anticipated increase in warranty claims.
But in general yes it does give them incentive to at least ensure a certain minimum quality level.
Yeah, its less stress on the bearing. As far as I know, all hitachi drives since the IBM Deskstar's have had a through shaft that attaches to the top cover of the drive.
Generally, only NAS drives have this from other manufactures.
Correction. The price fixing hasn't gone away after the Thailand floods. Now that SSDs are so expensive... Why would they release drives at a competitive price? They claim the reason NAND prices have gone up is because of smartphones. But I think the real reason is none of the flash memory makers are willing to increase production is because they like the profits they're getting right now.
I'm kind of with you. The He8's have been surprisingly reliable for such a complex drive. I installed a dozen or so over the years in Synology NAS's and no problems.
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nevcairiel - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
Would love an actual review of this drive and its direct competition, both from a desktop-usage and home storage perspective.KAlmquist - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
That's the downside of the SDD revolution--most tech site stopped reviewing mechanical drives.Samus - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
StorageReview is pretty much it. Tom's occasionally reviews them, but I agree. It seems the focus is on SSD's. I guess I get it, since SSD's have more performance variables (buying the wrong SSD is far more detrimental to buying the wrong HDD...unless you are buying a Seagate HDD)I think the last HDD review I read was around the time SMR came around. Hasn't been much since except for the articles discussing consolidation in the industry.
Are these Toshiba drives engineered entirely in-house or do they use IP from another manufacturer?
I've lately been sticking with WD to get as close to Hitachi IP as possible. WD was always my second choice anyway. I've had so much inconsistency with Seagate across the board over the last 7-8 years that I've just been avoiding them recently.
And what happened to Fujistu? I know Samsung was acquired by Seagate (as was Maxtor a decade ago) but do we realistically still have 3 players in the spinning glass field? For some reason I thought WD and Seagate were all that was left? I mean WD even owns Sandisk now, right?
Tams80 - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
Apparently (I was too lazy to do more than a quick search) Fujitsu sold their HDD business to Toshiba, so the drive here might have some Fujitsu pedigree in it.Gasaraki88 - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
Toshiba drives are made in house.Topweasel - Tuesday, September 19, 2017 - link
Toshiba got production and some IP from Hitachi. When WD purchased them they had to spin some of it off. The rest seems to be from Fujistu. But pretty much anything from those on has been in house (probably Fujistu engineers).Souka - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
just google "X300 Toshiba review" and you'll find plenty of reviews of the x300 line.The 4TB version reviews on Newegg scare me a bit.... but I didn't look much beyond that as I'm not looking for such a drive currently.
techguymaxc - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
You can find bad reviews for anything. I have 11 X300 4TB drives in my media server, most of which have been in operation 24x7 since January of last year. These drives are unbeatable at the price.KAlmquist - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
"Toshiba...says that they feature perpendicular magnetic recording and thus the drive has predictable performance and behavior."As far as I know, every disk drive on the market uses perpendicular magnetic recording. Probably what Toshiba means here is that they don't use shingled magnetic recording, where tracks overlap and writing a sector can require multiple passes.
Samus - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
It was noteworthy for them to mention in the article. I believe Seagate is the only one using SMR, but there is no reason not to believe others wont follow at some point. Although I hope they don't. It's one of the most ghetto ways to increase storage density next to outright compression.ddhelmet - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
All I want is a cheap drive with warranty. $0.0318 is still too high for 8TB HDD.Slaveguy - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
Grow up.wumpus - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
It's a desktop drive. It isn't like you need to be limited to one drive like most laptops. At $260, you could be comparing it to a RAID5 system (you would have had to have bought 3 hitachi 4T drives last week to beat it. Doesn't look like any such system today on pcpartpicker will match $260.This will certainly make sense in anything artificially constrained like NAS boxes or existing (especially government) contracts, and expect an inflated price for that. But don't buy it if you just want storage.
Samus - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
I've always felt long warranties for storage mediums are irrelevant.A) They don't cover data loss.
B) Storage devices lose value faster than any other component in a PC (except perhaps a GPU) due to their YoY improvements in technology and cost reduction.
C) Many people replace storage mediums before other components anyway
D) The average life of a PC platform is 3 years. However, I concede, the average warranty of an internal hard drive is 2 years.
E) Most PC components have warranties between 1-3 years. Rarely are they longer.
Occasionally you see ridiculous warranty periods from PSU and SSD manufactures (like Samsungs' 10 year warranty) but they are mostly gimmicks. The last time I used a warranty was on a PC Power & Cooling PSU which was 5 years old. They couldn't repair it (because OCZ shut down the Oceanside, CA facility shortly after their acquisition) and no longer had the same 750QUAD model in inventory so they replaced it with an EliteXtreme 800-watt unit, which is a piece of crap.
Go ahead and mail Samsung a failed 840 PRO and you will likely get back an 850 EVO. At first that seems like an improvement, but on paper you are actually losing features and consistency. I don't even know if Samsung manufactures planar MLC anymore to be able to make an 840 PRO.
nevcairiel - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
I don't think most of your points really apply that well to HDDs anymore. The tech is evolving extremely slowly and even capacity isn't going up that fast anymore, so I don't see a big YoY improvement. Closely linked to that, I would argue that as a result of that they tend to be in use for far longer then performance-critical components.Slaveguy - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
I don't think you earned the right to get of your knees to come up for air.CookieBin - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link
I agree. Mechanical drives are no longer apart of the upgrade cycle because rarely are there any real breakthroughs. I also think this article is trash for not comparing HGST drives, which are my personal favorite. Having said all that, SSDs have been gradually increasing in price as NAND supply decreases... If I'm going to pay overpriced NAND prices, I'd rather buy a NVME drive instead. And while these prices are great on toshiba drives, the warranty makes it useless. Who buys a mass storage solution with a 2 year warranty? Most competitors are providing a 3 or 5 year warranty.IndianaKrom - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link
Yeah, the reason I bought my last 2 hard drives wasn't because I was running out of capacity but because I had to replace failing drives, and both times the drives were only a few months out of warranty.Back when I was actually upgrading drives regularly, I was upgrading to 200-400% the capacity for around $100-120 every 2 years, today you're lucky if you can add 20% capacity for twice that price in 3-4 years. The useful service life of drives is just way longer now, so they need to hold up mechanically and a 2 year warranty doesn't inspire confidence.
Alexvrb - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link
HGST is WD.nevcairiel - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link
At least the Toshiba N300 have a 3 year warranty, which is the drive-type I would be more inclined to get for media storage.nevcairiel - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link
.. and I just noticed the article actually gets this wrong. I checked on the Toshiba page to confirm.Lolimaster - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
Without HAMR HDD's can't scale at all.Alexvrb - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link
A) Backups. At least for data that isn't easily replaced.B) We're talking HDDs. Snail pace.
C) I'd bet GPUs get replaced more often and even RAM probably gets upgraded about as often as storage, at least HDDs such as the one in the article.
D) All the more reason to want 3+ year warranties
E) I avoid brands that have crap warranties. Have been burned on both HDDs and GPUs.
Unrelated to the HDD article, but Samsung should replace an 840 Pro with an 850 Pro. However, even IF they gave you an 850 Evo, that's still an upgrade over the 840 Pro... plus it would be a new drive at no cost. Much better than simply "Oh well that had a 1 year warranty because warranties for storage are irrelevant, so you're boned". WD's warranties in particular have come in handy with a few systems, including a personal Raptor (the replacement was a better model too).
So yeah... I'd like at least 3 years warranty, even on storage. Warranties don't take the place of good product quality, but since we as consumers can't always predict the reliability of a given purchase, they give us a safety net and potentially save us some cash down the road.
peevee - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
Importantly, longer warranties give manufacturers motivation to test their designs better for longer wear to avoid being burned on warranty costs. A short warranty simply means even manufacturer itself thinks the products are going to fail en masse.Alexvrb - Wednesday, September 13, 2017 - link
Well, yes and no. In some cases you can extrapolate your expected failure rate as the drives age, and adjust warranty vs. pricing. For example let's say you have entry-level Aqua series and higher-perfomance Charcoal series drives, they have the same failure rates, but you want the premium drive to look even more appealing on paper. You can boost the warranty on the Charcoal and make sure retail pricing is adjusted accordingly to cover the anticipated increase in warranty claims.But in general yes it does give them incentive to at least ensure a certain minimum quality level.
FunBunny2 - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
-- The new client drives rely on a platform that attaches the motor both to the top and to the bottom of the HDDcan someone explain how that happens? sounds like the spindle has to be part of the motor; or, just the motor?
extide - Saturday, September 9, 2017 - link
Basically just the shaft attaches to the top & bottom vs just the bottom.Samus - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link
Yeah, its less stress on the bearing. As far as I know, all hitachi drives since the IBM Deskstar's have had a through shaft that attaches to the top cover of the drive.Generally, only NAS drives have this from other manufactures.
Mikuni - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link
$440 in EuropeMrSpadge - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
No, starting at 230€ + shipping:https://geizhals.de/toshiba-x300-high-performance-...
Mikuni - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
that price only from a shady seller. $440 directly from AmazonThe Von Matrices - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link
FYI the standard WD Red drives have only a 3 year warranty, not 5 yearsnevcairiel - Sunday, September 10, 2017 - link
And the Toshiba N300 come with 3 years as well.sonicmerlin - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
You could buy a 3 TB for $80 back in 2011. $260 for 8 TB in 2017? Wth?Gigaplex - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
Prices never really recovered after the 2011 Thailand floods.FastCarsLike - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
Correction. The price fixing hasn't gone away after the Thailand floods. Now that SSDs are so expensive... Why would they release drives at a competitive price? They claim the reason NAND prices have gone up is because of smartphones. But I think the real reason is none of the flash memory makers are willing to increase production is because they like the profits they're getting right now.Gigaplex - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
The BER rating is only 1e14, not really good enough for a drive this size.MrSpadge - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
That's standard for non-enterprise HDDs.Gigaplex - Tuesday, September 12, 2017 - link
The second sentence from this article:"The new X300 8 TB hard drive relies on a specially developed platform with enterprise features that promises to enable extended reliability"
I know it's not actually an enterprise drive, but it's claiming to be somewhat comparable. I'd expect an improved BER rating.
dgingeri - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
That puts it a mere $10 cheaper than the HGST Ultrastar He8, which is an enterprise grade drive. It's not much of a deal.Samus - Monday, September 11, 2017 - link
I'm kind of with you. The He8's have been surprisingly reliable for such a complex drive. I installed a dozen or so over the years in Synology NAS's and no problems.