INTRODUCTION

   With heat assisted magnetic recording technology (used by Seagate) and microwave assisted magnetic recording (used by WD) hard disk drives right around the corner competition in the storage media industry is heating up and Toshiba as expected couldn't be far behind. As a matter of fact, according to the top people over at Toshiba Storage their plans include the release of HDDs both with MAMR technology and later on with the HAMR technology (based on specs in time MAMR may not be able to keep up with HAMR in terms of total available capacity). This means that Toshiba should also have 20TB HDDs (and perhaps even 22TB) models in their product lines by the end of 2020. For now, however Toshiba just announced the addition of more 16TB models in their product lines (X300/P300) and even though we'd really like to take a look at those as well today with us we have a somewhat lower capacity variant, the X300 10TB.

   Toshiba Electronics Europe GmbH (TEE) is the European electronic components business of Toshiba Electronic Devices and Storage Corporation. TEE offers a broad IC and discrete product line including high-end memory, microcontrollers, ASICs and ASSPs for automotive, multimedia, industrial, telecoms and networking applications. The company also has a wide range of power semiconductor solutions as well as storage products including HDDs, SSDs, SD Cards and USB sticks. TEE was formed in 1973 in Neuss, Germany, providing design, manufacturing, marketing and sales and now has headquarters in Dusseldorf, Germany, with branch offices in France, Italy, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom. TEE employs approximately 300 people in Europe. Company president is Mr. Akira Morinaga.

   Toshiba currently aims the X300 family of 3.5" SATA III hard drives (Performance Series) towards desktop use and is currently available in 4/5/6/8/10/12/14/16TB capacities (10/12/14/16TB models were all added recently). Now although the entire line is comprised by 7200RPM models (the 10TB model we have here has a total of 7 platters - each 1.5TB in capacity) there are quite a few differences between them, for example the 4/5/6/8TB models feature 128MB cache whereas the 10/12/14TB models have 256MB and the top of the line 16TB model has 512MB. The 12/14/16TB models are also helium filled which further reduces friction and thus temperatures and power consumption. Everything else however remains the same so the entire line features perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), NCQ (native command queuing), ramp loading technology (improves reliability), stable platter technology (minimizes vibrations), internal shock sensors and dual stage actuators (offer increased performance, data integrity and overall drive reliability). Finally, Toshiba covers the entire X300 family of hard disk drives with a 2 year limited warranty and currently reports an MTTF (mean time to failure) of 600 thousand hours for entire line.