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Previously I've always used Seagate & Western Digital non enterprise type drives (around 30 of them) in my desktop PC's & NAS's. However I thought I'd try two 10TB Toshiba Enterprise drives this time, as they are currently over £70 cheaper than the 10TB Seagate Equivalents. I was a little concerned reading some reviews about the Toshiba's being 'noisy', however I was surprised once they were installed as they were only a bit more audible than my current 8TB WD Red drives. Yes you can hear them spinning, and yes you can hear the clunking from them when their actuators are active, but they're definitely NOT 'noisy' for enterprise drives. Many forget that enterprise drives are built sturdier and heavier than standard drives so they do make a little more noise, they're also built to be used literally 24/7 if necessary. Plus as hard drive capacity is increasing year on year there's more rotating mass inside of them, so masking noise completely is impossible with ANY spinning platter type drive.
I bough 4 drives over two orders. One of the drives failed after a couple of months. I contacted the seller and they flatly refused to replace the drive - they told me to contact Toshiba, which I did. Only one problem, the drives sold by this seller are not retail drives so in order to claim the warranty they have to be honoured by the seller and not by a end customer. luckily I was able to return the drive to Amazon as it was within their six month warranty period. If any of the other three drives fail after six months I'm f****d... So buy from this seller t your own risk.
I bought four of these 8TB drives over a period of a couple of weeks to replace my existing RAID drives one-by-one.
I received three drives made in November 2020, and one in July I think. Within a few days, my NAS started reporting SMART Seek Error Rate problems on one of the November drives and saying the drive was about to fail. I did some longer tests and it was not performing well. I sent it back to Amazon for a replacement, and received another November 2020 drive.
Over the following month, _all_ of the November batch drives including the replacement started to fail, while the July drive is fine -- although it does indicate one or two Seek errors. Unfortunately, by the time I realised the problem, one of the drives was outside Amazon's one month return period, so I'm stuck with it. I'm reasonably sure it was the July drive anyway, so it's not too bad.
Googling, it seems others have had the same issues with these specific drives.
Fortunately I have the spare cash to buy replacement WD Red Plus drives and get later refunds on the Toshibas, so I'm able to do a one-by-one replacement of the bad drives. Although I have 4+2 RAID and could theoretically replace two at a time, I do not trust these Toshiba drives enough to risk it.
With the first replacement (before I decided to get refunds and shell out for WD Red Plus drives instead) I did try talking to Amazon support. They advised me to turn off SMART error checking in the BIOS to correct the problem (!), and failing that, to call Toshiba. Instead, I just did the automatic Return process I should've done to start with.
Anyway, if you buy one of these and the serial number starts with "Y040", beware. Keep an eye on it, or just return it and buy a WD Red Plus instead.
The unit arrived well packed (although I did notice that the package had been resealed which at the time did not concern me). The unit formatted ok and I transfered a number of files and for a few days it was fine. Then it started to hesitate when loading a big file and before long I heard the dreaded clicking. A quick check with Crystal Disk Info showed the drive to have problem and sectors were being lost. I removed the drive and my files and requested a return which as you would expect was instantly granted.
A few days after I sent it back, I got a message from CCL Computers Ltd saying that "This was not the drive we sold you". Now we are not talking about a computer in an office we are talking about a home computer in the home of a comfortable off 75 year old retired IT company director. They of course could not know this, but I did so I explained that ONE Drive arrived, ONE Drive was fitted in the Computer. ONE Drive had failed and ONE Drive had been sent back. There was no chance of any confusion. The only thing that had changed was the packaging, because I had recycled their original box. This was followed by a couple more exchanges and it became clear I was not going to get anywhere with CCL and so I contacted Amazon direct. They were their usual efficient selfs and within a few days I had been refunded.
Moral of the story:- Read the reviews and when people talk about second rate drives and poor service take them seriously.
I have some 20 of these drives in various capacities in my home NAS/SAN's and have yet to have an issue with them.
These are probably in the most unfavourable conditions imaginable - some are crammed in a tight 2U chassis on top of each other, limited cooling with maximum dust and the storage arrays live in a cupboard under the stairs with little to no ventilation.
All of these drives sit in various forms of ZFS pools and are quite heavily used with lots of daily read/writes and the weekly scrub. I've not had a single drive fail yet in the 4+ years I've been using Toshiba which I am very happy with (especially given the thrashing they've had)
A couple of things to note though is that these drives run HOT (at least in my poor environment) and boy are they loud. Sitting in the same room as them while they are running an intensive operation is frankly unbearable.
I have been buying toshiba n300 8tb drives for several years. They provide about 240MBytes per second read and write, using 8K or 4K cluster size in windows and the performance is almost identical with bitlocker on or off. These drives are model HDWN180 with firmware GX2M. The new drives I just purchased still say N300 but without bitlocker on at 8K cluster size the write speed is 60Mbytes per second or less... with 16K cluster size they go back to 240Mbytes per second write but as soon as you switch bit locker on the performance tanks back to 60Mbytes per second. I believe that these drives either have bugs in their write cache algorithms or a CMR drives and not SMR. The smart info says the drives are HDWG NOT HDWN and the firmware is difference too 0603. So if you do not want terrible write performance dont buy Toshiba N300 drives with model HDWG buy the N300 HDWN drives I can find no information on toshiba's website about the differences between these two models. shame on toshiba for selling two very different lines of drives under the same name, shame on toshiba for not mentioning any differences about the two drives on their website shame on toshiba for not mentioning the N300 series has two very different models. shame on toshiba for not answering my email queries about the drives write performance issues, or even acknowledging my query.,
Does what it says on the box. I have read that some users are reporting a noise issue. Mine is as quiet as a mouse, trying to be quiet.
The packaging could be a lot better, as you would expect a hard drive to be securely packaged in a protective case. But hey. It did have 'bulk' in the description.
Excellent value for money. At the time of purchase. It is £165. Five pounds more than the 6TB version!
Update 26/02/2021 My server is now reporting S.M.A.R.T errors after a few weeks of use. I have requested a replacement. This could be an isolated fault. I will see how the replacement performs before changing my score.
I purchased these two HDs for my brand new Synology 720+ NAS, but they will be sent back, they are extremely noisy, and whilst the initial transfer rate on my 1000mbps network is excellent, at over 100MBs, this soon drops to less than 5MBs within less than a minute, at the same time a very loud noise starts coming from the NAS, as you can see, all I was transfering is multiple copies of Ubuntu ISOs in one folder, this totaled a little over 11GB,, and the noise started as soon as you get to the second ISO, could you imagine if I was transfering several 100s of small files?!
Could be a faulty batch, I don't know, but I have always used WD HD without any problems, and I will be going back to the WD Red Plus.
I'm running one of these together with a Toshiba N300 (non-enterprise) 10TB equivalent. Both in a btrfs raid 1 array in Debian Buster. Since adding this device (replacing 2 older 4TB hard drives) my home server is far noisier and network file copies aren't as fast. I've made sure that the partition is aligned correctly but disappointing and should have bought another N300.
Ordered 4 12TB drives for a RAIDZ2 array replacing 4 other drives in my Gen8 HP Proliant microserver. All 4 arrived with acceptable packaging and work. It's still too early to comment on reliability but I will update this review if I am experiencing any issues in that area.
As most reviews point out, they're pretty noisy and that's despite the 12TB+ versions being helium filled (probably barely makes a noise difference in reality). At idle they're perfectly acceptable but when seeking, they make quite the racket. Much louder than the Seagate 4TB Ironwolf NAS drives they replaced. Some of the noises made don't inspire confidence (I think this may be the sound of the heads parking/unparking). They can even be heard from the next room.
Noise aside, these drives work and seem to perform okay and they're a fair bit cheaper than their competitors. If you can live with the noise they're not a bad buy. At the time of writing, 12TB Seagate NAS drives are +£40 more each so I think I'd rather live with the noise and pocket the £160 I've saved.
