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.

SPECIFICATIONS AND FEATURES

THE NEARLINE MG04ACA500A 5TB

As always we received a bulk sample so nothing fancy here.

Design-wise the 3.5" housing of the MG04ACA500A looks a lot like the ones we see used with typical consumer HDDs.

Printed on the large sticker at the top of the drive are the model name, revision, serial number, barcode, electrical requirements, factory rollout date, capacity and several certification and warning logos.

As expected all of the components are placed on the interior of the rear PCB.

Four pins and the usual SATA power and data connectors are placed at the rear (a SAS model is also available).

TEST BED

TESTING METHODOLOGY

     Thoroughly testing hard disk drives may require time and patience but that's just about it. Of course that doesn't mean that one must take it lightly, at least not when people base their decision on your results. True many choose to only use 2 or 3 benchmarking suits in order to measure the performance of a drive or drives since quite honestly most benchmarking suites do tend to agree with each other (so it's not really wrong) but we always like to take things a step further not because we have to but because we want to be almost 100% certain of the results we get and post in our charts.

     So in this kind of reviews we will use a total of 7 different benchmarking suites in an effort to bring you the most accurate results across the board. Now the only reason why i say effort is because real-world usage is not always on par with what results one gets by running several benchmarks on a drive and that's mainly because there are many variables at work from ambient temperatures to hardware configurations and even firmware versions. The benchmarking applications we use are the AIDA64 suite (former Everest Pro), HD Tune Professional, HD Tach RW, ATTO, Sisoftware Sandra Pro, Crystal Disk Mark 64bit and the PCMARK 7 (secondary storage suite). These benchmarking tools are the best in what they do and as you will also see later on their results more or less agree. Each test is performed a total of 6 times and then the average is recorded into the charts. Temperatures are recorded using Hard Disk Sentinel and after 45 minutes of continuous testing in a 23 degrees Celsius temperature controlled room. Finally we also use an ExTech HD600 dBA meter on each of the drives (5cm away) in order to accurately record their noise levels (during access), although if you don't turn off all system fans when doing so it's quite possible that you will never even hear the drive. The operating system as usual is a fresh installation of Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate Service Pack 1 with every update installed up until the 16th of July 2014.

TEST RESULTS - AIDA64 / ATTO

TEST RESULTS - HD TACH RW / HD TUNE PRO

TEST RESULTS - SISOFTWARE SANDRA PRO / CRYSTAL DISK MARK

TEST RESULTS - TEMPERATURES / NOISE LEVELS

CONCLUSION

   Although we were unable to finish the secondary storage suite of PCMARK 7 with the MG04ACA500A 5TB HDD by Toshiba (returned error code 87) things went extremely well on every other test and in some it even managed to trade blows with the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 V4 6TB HDD by Seagate. Overall the Seagate ES V4 6TB drive does come ontop by a relatively small performance margin and thus still holds the title of fastest 3.5" HDD in our charts but compared to previous Nearline models the MG04ACA500A 5TB drive is simply put quite impressive. Toshiba however didn't stay there and aside using the same buffer size (128MB) they also offer the same MTBF (Meantime Between Failures) of 1.4 million hours, similar power consumption under load (11.3W) and the same 5 year warranty as Seagate so read/write performance is obviously not the only area they aimed to match them at.

   Toshiba enterprise grade HDD models are not very easy to come by in the consumer market (unlike the ones by Seagate) so it took quite a while for us to find that the Nearline MG04ACA500A 5TB HDD currently retails for around 320Euros inside the EU (unfortunately we couldn't locate this model in the USA at the time of this review) a price tag that puts it roughly 30% beneath the Enterprise Capacity 3.5 V4 6TB model by Seagate. Of course we're talking about an 5TB model so a comparison with a 6TB one is not the most ideal one but either way Toshiba obviously wants to compete with Seagate in this area as well. In conclusion Toshiba seems to be finally taking some serious steps in order to compete directly with their largest (and perhaps only) rival and since the MG04ACA500 5TB HDD just couldn't be better it gets our Platinum Award.

PROS

- Enterprise Class Quality
- 1.4 Million Hours MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures)
- Excellent Performance (2nd Only To The ES V4 6TB Drive)
- 5TB's Of Capacity
- Write Cache Technology
- Temperatures/Noise Levels
- 5 Years Warranty

CONS

- Price (For Some)