Cheap 3TB Toshiba HDD - is there a catch?

[JonFX01]

This Toshiba 3TB, 3,5", 7200rpm, 64MB, SATA, DT01ACA300 is around 40% less expensive than the other choices I have in my area. Is it inferior in some way compared to the WD and Seagate HDD's that people usually use in their builds?

What should I look for when purchasing a HDD?

 

[eton975]

It's probably superior to the ST3000DM001 actually, considering the Toshie's 3 year warranty in the Americas and the lack of horror stories about it.

I would take a HGST or WD Black drive over it, but those are waaaaaaaaayyyyy more expensive.

 

[Essence_of_War]

This Toshiba 3TB, 3,5", 7200rpm, 64MB, SATA, DT01ACA300 is around 40% less expensive than the other choices I have in my area. Is it inferior in some way compared to the WD and Seagate HDD's that people usually use in their builds?

It's a fine hard drive: at least as good as any 3TB 7200 RPM models from Seagate, far better than WD's 5400 RPM green drives, but probably not quite as nice as the whatever special sauce WD bakes into their black drives.

If you need 3 TB of storage, and that's the best price near you I'd have no reservations about picking that one up.

 

[AlienTech]

Toshiba uses better quality components so I would definitely got for it. Although with high tech, using better components is not as important as better software and support. As we saw with the samsung SSD's, although using similar components, their software has created a drive far superior to the others and they can charge a premium for it. Some other things in drives is using extra screens and such which does not add all that much to the cost but improve reliability by a wide margin. Most likely all it means is, the components will likely last long after the drive is dead and past its prime. But there is the small difference of slight speed increases.. I noticed toshiba drives have latencies as low as 11ms while the seagates are closer to 16ms.. Thats quite a huge difference.. Even with the same spindle speeds the Toshibas are 10% faster.. Which indicates that the seagates are designed to use marginal platters and have a lot of spare areas they can map out. The toshibas would slow down drastically with marginal platters due to this. So I hope they use higher quality platters as well.

 

[Coup27]

I recently looked into buying a 3TB Toshiba drive and on checking the data sheet found the noise levels to be quite high compared to a WD. So I would watch out for that.

 

[smitbret]

I recently looked into buying a 3TB Toshiba drive and on checking the data sheet found the noise levels to be quite high compared to a WD. So I would watch out for that.

Depends on which WD. They are slightly noisier than the Greens/Reds but quieter than than the Blues/Blacks. That is to say their noise level is no reason to avoid it. I have 2 in my server and they are very quiet.

 

[Celeryman]

I've got two of these running in a linux software raid configuration for a NAS. Purchased them a couple months ago and have been happy with them. Noise is not bad at all.

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

It's a rebadged Hitachi HDS723030BLE640, excellent drive.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I like mine.

 

[ronbo613]

Not wanting to hijack the thead, but since the Toshiba 3TB sounds like a good deal, how about the 4TB version? Always need more big hard drives and been buying mostly Hitachi 7200rpm Desktop NAS drives, but they are pretty expensive. If the Toshiba 4 TB is roughly the same quality as the Hitachi and $50 cheaper, I'd start buying those.

 

[PC_]

got a few, 3tb, 4tb and 5tb toshiba drives, they are excellent, much better then seagate and western

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

I believe >= 4TB drives are Toshiba in-house designs.
That said, I have a couple of their 5TBs in my fileserver, and they seem to be working just fine (24/7 for the last 2-3 months).

 

[spat55]

I think one of my 3TB externals are dying but I requested a RMA and even with the receipt they got arsey so haven't bothered anymore, I'm in UK so not sure how you're RMA would go if anything went wrong, if it dies totally then I will cause a sh**storm.

 

[AlienTech]

heh ALL of them are rather stingy with warranty claims. Unlike before where they used to send you a drive that would work, these days they turn down claims for any and all reasons. I sent in a rather new drive that developed errors, got a refurbished one back, would not have minded so much but it was a degraded one without NCQ and used for an year or more as it had scratches and dents. Another one which supposedly had a 5 year warranty I sent in got another certified drive that developed errors in less than 100 hours of use. Another one they did not even bother sending back other than to mark it as warranty failed because I updated the firmware after it got errors. Since there is no one to contact, I never did receive a reply or the drive back.. I really got miffed about the brand new drive being replaced by a lesser used model without even the same functionality. I dont know if places like backblaze ever gets back decent drives.. But form my own experiences, the drives that come back are unreliable and degraded.. Which means you can not just replace the failed drive. They may work fine, but often you dont know.. A decade ago they would send back new drives in many cases. I think the refurbished drives also have a reduced warranty of like 30 or 90 days. Mine said 30 days even though an year remained of the original warranty.

 

[ZimZum]

Its a rebadged Hitachi. Hitachi > *

http://www.pcworld.com/article/2089...eals-the-most-reliable-hard-drive-makers.html