INTRODUCTION

   After a couple of years stuck with up to 4TB HDD capacity models all three major players in the market have finally crossed the 5TB line and although i can't speak for all of you out there that's become reason enough for both me and several people i know to celebrate since instead of three 4TB drives we can now use two 6TB ones (imagine how much difference that can make for professionals who own entire arrays of 4TB drives). Capacity however is not the only thing that has improved since if you've checked our review of the 6TB Enterprise Capacity 3.5 model by Seagate then you know that performance has also increased quite a bit and although we've yet to test the Helium drive by HGST leaving back its Ultrastar predecessors shouldn't be an issue. Today however our review revolves around the latest addition in the Nearline Enterprise Class product line by Toshiba the MG04ACA500A 5TB SATA III model.

   Toshiba Europe Storage Products Division (SPD) has remained at the forefront of the storage industry for over 40 years and is the world's only storage supplier that owns design, development, manufacturing, sales and other infrastructure functions spanning the enterprise, mobile and retail environments for both HDD and SSD products. Customers are original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), system integrators and distributors within the EMEA region. As a leading provider of integrated storage solutions and as the principal inventor of NAND flash storage, Toshiba sets many of today’s industry standards for storage technology. Throughout its history, Toshiba SPD has revolutionized the design and development of storage devices and its drives can be found inside the world's leading GPS navigation systems, consumer electronics, computers and enterprise solutions. In addition, Toshiba Storage Products Division offers an extensive range of advanced technology drives such as high durability 24/7, extended temperature and SSDs for the consumer, industrial, enterprise and automotive sector.

   I haven't really had the chance to test many Toshiba Nearline models in the past (as a matter of fact only one has been reviewed here) but the ones that did found their way in my hands offered very good read/write performance levels although not really enough to directly compete with the Enterprise Capacity line(s) by Seagate (AKA Constellation ES). However in the Enterprise market performance is not the most important feature people look for in a drive since reliability is a lot more crucial for mission-critical 24/7 applications such as high-density cloud services and analytic workloads. Well the good news is that Toshiba has a near perfect track record in that area so what we're mostly interested in is whether or not this time over their latest Nearline drive with its rotational speed of 7200RPM and 128MB buffer has any chance of actually matching the performance levels of the latest Enterprise Capacity v4 line by Seagate.