Toshiba n300 review in Spanish (complete analysis)

Mechanical hard drives are far from finished, and manufacturers such as Toshiba or WD innovate and improve these units to provide them with incredible storage capacities like the one we see today. We will analyze the Toshiba N300 14 TB, a unit optimized for use on NAS and 24/7 operation thanks to the use of helium in the internal camera of dishes and a cache of 256 MB. It is not everything, because we can find drives from 4 TB to 16 TB.

All this and more is what this unit will provide us, which we will know in depth today and analyze its performance. Let us begin!

Before we begin, we appreciate the trust that Toshiba places in us by transferring this HDD to us for analysis.

Toshiba N300 technical characteristics

Unboxing

A positive aspect of this Toshiba N300 is that it will arrive in a very good cardboard box with quite complete information on the external faces. It also comes with photos of the interior of the product and a nice presentation.

Inside, a mold has been used to ensure the integrity of the unit for its transfer from the Far East to our hands. In turn, the disc will come in a traditional antistatic bag. In an individual box we will only find the unit and absolutely nothing else for the sole purpose of the user guide.

Design and encapsulation

The Toshiba N300 is not just about a mechanical hard drive in use, as the design condition especially for NAS is asserted, especially in higher capacity drives like these. We must know that they are hard drives built to work 24/7, that is, continuously and without pause, on NAS devices, servers and RAID configurations, private clouds, multimedia services and to store data in small companies.

The one we are analyzing is the 14TB drive, but it will be important to know that the 12, 14 and 16TB configurations come with an internal chamber pressurized with helium instead of air. The advantage is that it is a gas with a lower density, which considerably reduces the damage caused by turbulence during the turning of the plates and the interaction of the reading heads. Being less dense also reduces energy consumption, since the resistance to rotation is reduced. And finally, it allows to add more storage plates and closer to each other by reducing this turbulence in the turn.

This encapsulation will always be hermetic to ensure the gas inside. The manufacturer ensures in its specifications a noise in idle mode of 20 dB for units with helium. While the units with air inside will generate 33 dB, so the difference is important especially when we have enough disks installed in a NAS.

These features have been improved thanks to the incorporation of RV sensors that are capable of detecting the rotational vibration of the units and compensating them in real time to improve the durability of the unit. Let's think that these Toshiba N300 are surely installed together on the NAS or server bays, and their joint operation will cause some instability when the heads are all moving at the same time. Temperature sensors are also included precisely to ensure integrity in closed environments. Its maximum reliable operating temperature is 65 ^o C in activity.

As for the external encapsulation we have no notable differences with other hard drives, since aluminum and metal have been used mostly. On one side we will have the corresponding unit characteristics sticker, while on the other the PCB is left bare with the electronics always with the components inside so that it is not damaged. Let's keep in mind that these units are relatively fragile, so it is better to treat them gently and not make sudden movements with them. In them we can find up to 7 plates in a thickness of just 26 mm, specifically they will be 6 for the 14 TB model, that is, 12 reading heads.

Features and technical characteristics

We have already seen much of the characteristic differences of this Toshiba N300 with respect to hard drives for general consumption, because despite being an HDD we have enough news about it.

This Toshiba N300 unit is available in quite a few storage configurations, albeit all with large capacities. From 4 TB to 10 TB we will have air pressurization, while from 12 to 16 TB helium pressurization. In all cases, these are units that operate at 7200 RPM, with an average latency of 4.17 ms.

One of the most differential characteristics with respect to the units of general consumption is that its memory buffer is of greater capacity. For these N300 we have 128 MB of cache from 4 to 8 TB, 256 MB from 10 to 14 TB and finally 512 MB for 16 TB drives. They also have their own Dynamic Cache technology, which is basically an algorithm that optimizes the use of cache for reading or writing in real time. Finally, they support the NCQ (Native Command Queing) function for data management in reading and writing.

If we look at the performance data provided by the manufacturer for these units, we will see that they are slightly above those of other manufacturers. Although we see this in our testing section below. The number of platters logically influences its performance, and on this 14TB drive we have 260MB / s sequential read / write. Values start at 204 MB / s for 4TB drives and go up to 274MB / s for 16TB drives.

Something important about them will be the guarantee and their writing figures in their useful life. In this case we have a 3-year unlimited warranty on TBW on all units. Perhaps a higher figure like 5 years would have been more advantageous for the user. In any case, the manufacturer estimates as valid a workload of 180 TB / year and between 1 million and 1.2 million hours in the mean time to failure (MTTF).

Last but not least, Toshiba dates this unit's consumption figures at about 4.54W with no disk activity and 6.77W in operation. In this way, if we have a NAS with about 8 occupied bays (112 TB) we will have a consumption of 54W, being very good figures. We can see that the units with air chamber have a notably higher consumption, reaching almost 10W in the 10 TB HDD due to the greater resistance of the air to the rotation of the plates.

Test equipment and benchmarks

We now turn to the test battery for this Toshiba N300. To do this, we have used the following test bench:

TESTING BENCH
Processor:	Intel i9-9900K
Base plate:	Asus Maximus Formula XI
Memory:	16 GB DDR4
Heatsink	Corsair H100i Platinum SE
HDD	Toshiba N300
Graphic card	EVGA RTX 2080 Super
Power supply	Cooler Master V850 Gold

The tests to which we have submitted this SSD are as follows:

Crystal Disk MarkAS SSD BenchmarkATTO Disk BenchmarkAnvil´s Storage

All these programs are in current versions, and we have also used our usual platform to know the performance data instead of a NAS. Remember not to abuse these tests in your drives, since it affects the life time of the drive, especially in SSD.

Toshiba launched its 16TB drive at IFA 2019.

Final words and conclusion about the Toshiba N300 14 TB

When buying a good hard drive for your NAS we stick to the manufacturers Western Digital or Seagate. But Toshiba shows us in this analysis that it is at the height of its competition and that it surpasses it with the incorporation of helium inside in its 12, 14 and 16 TB versions .

As main characteristics we find the SATA III interface, a rotation speed of 7200 RPM and a buffer size of 256 MB. Its MTTF is 1, 200, 000 million hours and we have a 3-year guarantee.

We recommend reading our guide on the best hard drives on the market

In our test bench it has given a great result with a sequential read / write that is close to the theoretical 260 MB / s and a very low loudness. Once we installed it on a NAS like the QNAP TS-332X, it gives us 14 TB to house information on a single disk and perfect compatibility with QTS.

To finish, we can find this Toshiba N300 of 14 TB at a price in Amazon of approximately 427 euros, being somewhat cheaper than for example the IronWolf of Seagate and much more than the RED NAS of Western Digital. Specifically we are paying 3.05 cents per GB of storage being really cheap.

ADVANTAGE	DISADVANTAGES
+ FROM 4 TB TO 16 TB	- WE EXPECTED AT LEAST 5 YEARS WARRANTY
+ MODELS, 12, 14 AND 16 WITH HELIUM INSIDE = LESS NOISE AND MORE RELIABILITY IN HDD WITH MANY DISHES
+ IDEAL FOR NAS
+ PERFORMANCE
+ VERY SILENT

The Professional Review team awards you the platinum medal and recommended product:

Toshiba N300 3.5 "14000 GB Serial ATA III - Hard Drive (3.5", 14000 GB, 7200 RPM)

Toshiba's N300 3.5-inch internal hard drive offers unprecedented reliability for NAS and other high-performance storage systems. It is optimized to meet the demands for high capacity storage reliability, strength, performance and scalability 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for home, home and small business use. The N300 is available in capacities up to 14TB. Thanks to its contacts with NAS manufacturers, Toshiba recognizes the need for highly reliable drives to meet modern demands for data storage and retrieval, such as continuous reading, backup and records. The unit can support multiRAID systems with up to 8 hard drives, reliably store large volumes of data, and access multiple clients 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.