INTRODUCTION

   3.5 inch mechanical hard disk drives may still not hold a candle against the newest solid state drives both in terms of performance and power consumption but thanks to their immensely better price/capacity ratio they still represent the best and perhaps only choice for storage demanding applications. To get an idea about how much different the price/capacity ratio between HDDs and SSDs is currently we only need to point out that a 1TB SATA SSD costs roughly the same as a 10TB 3.5" SATA HDD. Of course as many of you already know HDD manufacturers currently offer models designed for use with specific hardware (specialized) such as servers, desktop computers, network video recorders and even network attached storage (NAS) devices so just knowing the storage capacity you need is not enough. Today's review is about the 6TB version (HDWN160) of the new N300 High Reliability Hard Drive designed for use with NAS devices by our friends over at Toshiba.

   Toshiba Electronics Europe (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.

   The N300 High Reliability HDD may be aimed towards use with NAS devices (supports multi-RAID systems with up to 8 drives) but that doesn't mean Toshiba placed performance second to power consumption, heat buildup and vibrations. So since the N300 HDD spins at 7200RPM and has 128MB cache it can achieve data transfer speeds of up to 210MB/s for the 6TB model that we have here (HDWN160), 240MB/s for the 8TB model and 200MB/s for the 4TB model. Of course endurance/durability is equally important (if not more) so the N300 is rated for a workload factor of 180TB (Terabytes Written) per year, has an MTBF (meantime between failures) of 1 million hours and is backed by a 3 year limited warranty. Other features include internal shock detection (helps protect your drive and data), built-in rotational vibration (RV) sensor (ensures high reliability), heat prevention controls (automatically adjust seek speed to minimize potential data damage), error recovery control (helps prevent critical downtime for business-use multi-RAID environments) and a proprietary tied spindle motor (stabilizes the motor drive shaft at both ends to curb system-induced vibration and optimize system performance during read/write operations).