Reliability of Toshiba drives.  

I've got a Toshiba X300 5GB in this rig, 2 years old. I can't complain. Very good performance. Still got a clean SMART. Hasn't died yet. The X series is their performance drive similar to the WD Black.

Talk to me in 10 years.
I've got a couple of 640GB Western Digital Black drives still going and dishing out video that are going on 12 years old. That is the true test of a good hard drive!

Just my opinion -

Anyone who buys a new computer today should have at least a 1 TB SSD as their main storage. RAM should be a minimum of 16 GB.
The HDD as the main storage medium is the real bottleneck, while too little RAM makes for more paging.

HDD is best for archival storage.

FWIW.

Silexium said:

Hey, all.

Basically, I want to know if you've had good experiences with Toshiba drives (particularly external ones). Have they been fast, reliable, delivered consistent performance? How are they in comparison to WD drives & other drive manufacturers? The drive in particular that I want to know about is TOSHIBA MQ04ABF100. This drive is part of a Silicon Power external HDD enclosure.

I'm a little late to the party, but . . .

I have several external drives, including Toshiba, which I've been using pretty much since they came out. I've never had a Toshiba external fail. My daughter had a Western Digital that failed (we did finally manage to get her data off it).

Silexium said:

Thanks for replying! What write speeds do you get on your external drives? I get about 50 MB/s on mine, which is about half of what I used to get. This drive uses SMR, which is frowned upon for having extremely slow write speeds when drives using it get full. I've seen reports of write speeds as low as 1 MB/s! At first, I thought my drive was failing, so I made a post on Reddit about it & here to determine if my drive was soon to kick the bucket or not. I've ran multiple CHKDSKs, tested the drive using HD Sentinel & CrystalDiskInfo & everything came back fine. I guess the drive is just slow due to SMR.

My Toshiba external drive is dated August 2013, so is almost 8 years old. I'd be willing to guess it predates CMR!

I use it for storing storing tutorials for my Windows 10 for Seniors students. The tutorials aren't overly long, but do contain a lot of screen shots. Saving them to my Toshiba external drive is almost instantaneous, but I can't tell you what its write speed is. I used USB Flash Benchmark to check its speed, but kinda got confused when it showed speeds that were unimaginably at the speed of light!

Since I didn't know what SMR is, I decided to look it up. Here's one link I found, which lets me understand why SMR would make your Toshiba write slower than it should. As you can see in the article, if I understand it correctly, SMR will let you pack more data onto a hard drive, while its predecessor has faster write speeds.

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