Toshiba X300 4TB Performance Desktop and Gaming 3.5" Internal Hard Drive with 7200 RPM & 128MB Cache

I bought this drive to replace a failed media server drive. I’ve since used a virtual machine to host the library which I moved to this drive. It works great.Write and read speeds are pretty fast for a mechanical drive.(skip this paragraph if you aren’t a technical person - tech speak ahead warning lol)Currently, I am hosting three VMWare VMs that are running 24/7: Windows Server 2019 which runs Active Directory, Distributed File System (DFS) (Primary Node), and IIS; Second VM is a Linux secondary DNS server, third is my media server- hosting 2TB of TV shows and movies.The drive is noisy but not too noisy - early 2000s noisy. To me that doesn’t bother me as its slightly nostalgic.Overall great drive and performance for the money.(Comment re some of the bad reviews)For those concerned, maybe buy one of those square trade warranties amazon offers. Mechanical Hard drives in general like to fail for the stupidest reasons. Toshiba does have a god awful RMA process and I know that from a laptop of theirs I had that failed - NOTHING to do with this drive. It could be the idiot who delivered it dropped it on the way or something. We all know some couriers are idiots. But this drive has so far done me well and it’s under tremendous load 24/7. 3 servers and continuous media transfers. It’ll handle the load - provided it’s handled correctly and not punted or drop kicked into your yard by the delivery driver.

I have had good luck with Toshiba P300 drives in the past, so when I needed a new parity disk for my unraid server, I thought I'd step up the the 6TB X300. I ordered and then read the reviews, which made me start to regret my possibly hasty order. However, I got the drive and installed it. In unraid, there is a "pre-clear" procedure which basically works the disk really hard, writing to every single sector of the disk. I let this run several cycles over a couple of days and I never ran into a single error. Not only that, but this disk is very quiet. I have since assigned it as the parity drive which writes to the disk and works it very hard for many, many hours while it syncs. I have then replaced one of the array drives, which pulls huge amounts of data from the parity drive for hours and hours.Maybe I've been really lucky, or maybe people are just more likely to write a review when something goes bad - don't know. The only thing I see different about this disk an my other disks is that it runs a few degrees hotter when it's busy, but I guess it's a higher performing drive, so will generate a bit of extra heat.What I would say, is that this disk should be quiet as a mouse. If you buy one and it's immediately loud, send it back for RMA. The common thread here among people reporting failures seems to be that this drive is very loud when they get it. From my experience, I think this is a pre-failure warning that you shouldn't ignore.If anything goes wrong in the coming months, I will be sure to update this review.

I am a Mac user, so what I'm about to say probably does not apply to a PC. I just bought a new 2017 iMac and it is loaded with the fastest 4.2 GHz i7 quad-core processor, a 3TB Fusion drive, and 64GB of RAM, running Sierra. Speed should not be an issue. I bought a pair of these drives to store some files that I prefer to keep in encrypted .DMG containers. Disk Utility makes it easy to create such containers. When you do the math, you realize that even when writing at USB3 speeds, about 100 MB/sec, it will take about 24 hours to fill up an entire 8TB X300 drive with this encrypted container. After the first drive was written to, I found something that did not seem right: when you enter the password and open the container, all writes to it are dog slow, as in 5-10 MB/sec. That's not right.At first I attributed the problem to the drive, so I opened the second X300 drive and repeated the operation, but found the same slow write speed to the opened container. One drive bad, okay. Two drives bad? No. Using Disk Utility's First Aid showed no signs of issues with the drive. Any other writes to the drive to non-encrypted folders, or a non-encrypted container, and the speeds are normal. Reads from either encrypted or non-encrypted folders/containers are also normal-fast.Some internet research revealed that this problem has been going on for many years and several releases of OSX. It would appear that the slow write speeds to an encrypted container are not a function of any hard drive, but a bug inside Mac OSX. The same internet research found neither a solution nor a workaround. I worked at it and found that there IS a workaround, although it's not fast or easy to do. What you do is find yourself an old Mac that runs Snow Leopard (10.6.8). I have an old iMac that fits the bill, but unfortunately, if it runs Snow Leopard, it means that its ports are limited to either USB2 or Firewire800 (FW800). Writing to these big-capacity drives when your speed is limited to 20-40 MB/sec is going to be SLOW. I was able to put the drives in a FW800 enclosure to get a faster speed than USB2.You now use Disk Utility in the Snow Leopard-based Mac and create the encrypted container on the X300 drive using it. It took about 2.6 days to complete. When complete, you then move the drive over to your newer, fast Mac and connect it up through USB3. When you open the encrypted container, created in Snow Leopard, mount it on the Sierra-based Mac desktop, you find that write speeds are finally what you expect, about 100 MB/sec. I think I'm the first guy to find a viable workaround for this issue. It verifies that the issue is a bug buried in later versions of OSX, which according to some people goes back all the way to Lion (10.7). It's an Apple bug. The observed slow write speeds to the encrypted X300 drive is NOT a problem with the hard drive.Additionally, once you are running on the new fast Mac, you can copy this encrypted container to any other drive (the second X300 drive that I bought), and when you open it, the write speeds are again fast as they should be. In other words, it is just the CREATION of the encrypted container that is the bug in Apple's later Disk Utility code. Formatting, reading, and copying are just fine. How you manage to slap Apple's face to get them to fix it, I don't know.Sorry for the long story, but the slow write speeds to the encrypted container would have been a deal breaker for me. I would have wrapped up the drives and sent them back, blaming the hard drive for what turned out to be a Mac OSX bug. I have found that these drives perform as well as you would expect them to with no slowness or other oddness that I first attributed to the possibility that these drives might use SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) that is notorious for slow writing speeds. Toshiba won't tell anyone what technology is inside their drives, but industry insiders swear it is not SMR. Reads and writes now operate reasonably fast on USB3 for my needs, regardless of whether there is encryption involved or not. You just have to be careful not to use any OSX version of 10.7 or higher to create an encrypted container.