INTRODUCTION

   When people talk about hard disk drives or are out looking to get a brand new one the two names that always come up first are as expected of the two leading brands currently in the market namely Seagate and WD (Western Digital). Still although these two are always leading the HDD market (and trading blows over the years in terms of sales) Toshiba doesn't seem to be giving up and although their market share is not nearly as high as those of the other two they seem to be doing quite well especially after taking into account the number of markets/industries Toshiba is currently active in. The X300 line of high-performance 3.5" internal hard drives is among their latest ones and today we'll be testing the 5TB model.

   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.

   The Toshiba X300 family of 3.5" SATA III hard drives (this is primarily a consumer oriented desktop line) is currently available in 4/5/6/8TB capacities (the 8TB version was added some months after the rest) all of which feature a rotational speed of 7200RPM, 128MB of cache, perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR), NCQ (native command queuing), ramp loading technology (improves reliability) and dual stage actuators (offer increased performance, data integrity and overall drive reliability). Now whereas the 4/5/6TB models feature single 1TB platters to achieve their advertised capacities the 8TB model comes with a total of six 1.33TB platters thus featuring a higher area density (that should also improve performance but unless we can get our hands on it we can't be certain). Finally Toshiba covers the X300 family of hard disk drives with a 2 year limited warranty and reports an MTFB (meantime between failures) of 1.4 million hours.