INTRODUCTION

   If you are reading these lines then you should be well aware that the two main reasons behind the increasing demands in storage capacity all of us have are the continuous speed upgrades we have been enjoying in internet bandwidth during the past 10 years in most places around the globe combined of course with the wide availability in Full HD/HD media content. Because of that most people (namely casual users, gamers and even some overclockers) naturally put the usual capacity/price ratio above performance and especially nowadays with the current state of the economy i can't really blame them for doing that (besides mostly for backup purposes you don't really need the best possible performance factor). However there are many enterprise users, professionals and enthusiasts out there who always place performance and data integrity above the usual capacity/price ratio and this is where 2.5" SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives like the latest Toshiba MK3001GRRB come in.

   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.

   There are three things i particularly like about SAS drives, first and foremost their industrial/enterprise grade components that give them extra-long MTBF (Meantime Between Failures) compared to regular drives, second their increased RPM (Rotations Per Minute) which in turn give them superior performance and third the fact that they require dedicated SAS cards which save system resources, can help improve security for your critical data and finally give you a rather significant performance boost (mid/high-end SAS card models). Getting back to the product at hand the Toshiba MK3001GRRB is an 2.5inch 300GB SAS 2.0 HDD with an MTBF of 1.600.000 hours, a rotational speed of 15.000RPM and 32MB Cache. So it's quite clear after reading the drive specifications that there are only a handful of drives available in the market currently that can really go up against the rotational speed of the MK3001GRRB (especially 2.5" ones) so without further delay let's see what it can do.