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.
A bit of Google implies that this series of Toshiba drives utilize "SMR" technology....shingled magnetic recording.
Which is apparently frowned on in some circles.
I have no personal experience or opinion; I have not bought an HDD in 7 years and have never owned a Toshiba.
Buyer beware—that 2TB-6TB “NAS” drive you’ve been eyeing might be SMR | Ars Technica
This is a reference indicating that the MQ04ABF100 uses SMR: Toshiba publishes list of consumer HDDs that use shingled magnetic recording – Blocks and Files
SMR is supposed to give poorer performance than drives that don't use that technology. I can't speak to any impact on reliability.
The claimed MTBF (mean time between failures) for the drive is 600,000 hours (68 years). Toshiba MQ04ABF100 - hard drive - 1 TB - SATA 6Gb/s Specs & Prices - CNET I don't know how credible that is, but it seemes adequate.
A 1T SSD is almost same price of first line HDD.
Have used many Crucial BX500 .
They are fast and cheap. So far so good
The main impact of SMR on drive performance seems to be on the write speed. I have quite a few external USB 1TB and 2TB HDDs, a Seagate, a WD and the rest are Toshibas (some in the MQ04 family, so definitely using SMR). All seem equally reliable, none have ever had problems.
For external long-term storage speed is not an issue for me. Though for a USB connection at least, SMR doesn't seem to have much impact.
What write speeds do you get on your SMR drives? On my external drive, I get around 20 - 70 MB/s, which is really slow. There's nothing wrong with the drive itself (no strange sounds when running, no problems connecting to my PC, no S.M.A.R.T. issues...). The drive is about 60% full & it's encrypted using BitLocker, so that might have an effect on performance.
@Silexium: Indeed, with 1TB SSDs now US$95 to US$150 or so (see this Newegg Search for example) I agree with other posters that HDDs at that capacity are a bit dicey (especially 3.5" drives). In fact, you can buy a pretty good 2TB 2.5" refurb HDD for about US$65. I was just surprised to observe that pricing on 7,200 RPM models for such drives is higher than the last time I bought some a couple of years ago. I paid right around US$100 for models with SSHD capabilities in 2018 or 2019; now, they cost around US$130-140. Sheesh!
--Ed--
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