INTRODUCTION

   We are just months away before the new 5TB mechanical drives make their debut (perhaps sooner) but since price is one of the most decisive factors when choosing a HDD most people still seem to prefer 1TB/2TB models over the larger 3TB/4TB ones. Now as many of you know not only do we always focus to bring reviews of the latest HDD models the industry has to offer but also of the highest capacity variants available. However today we decided to change things a bit and so although we are going to test two brand new HDD models we thought it would be best to test the 1TB variants which should be more appealing to casual users and gamers. So as the title clearly states today on our test bench are the latest 1TB HDD models from Toshiba, the 5700RPM DT01ABA100 and the 7200RPM DT01ACA100.

   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.

   Normally I’m not really that excited to test an HDD model with a rather small capacity (mainly because smaller variants have sometimes performed slightly better than their larger brothers in the past), however the Toshiba DT01ABA100 and the DT01ACA100 are not your average everyday hard disk drives since these were designed and manufactured specifically as green low-power/temperature/noise solutions (especially the DT01ABA100), or at least that's what you'd think after checking their specifications sheet. On top of that Toshiba is using the latest AF (Advanced Format) Technology which according to them is based on 4K byte-per-sector formatting and improved error-correcting code functions to provide maximum error detection and more efficient use of the storage surface area. What do all these translate to? Well let's not ruin the surprise so read on to find out.