A few years ago, Western Digital launched a highly successful NAS line. Seagate followed suit and after the HGST/ Samsung acquisitions, the market has been two players for some time. Essentially, hard drive manufacturers take consumer SATA SSDs enabling a few features/ firmware for small NAS environments (1-8 hard drives.) This allows NAS hard drives to be priced at a premium to their desktop counterparts. Now Toshiba is joining the NAS hard drive fray with the Toshiba N300 series.
Toshiba N300 NAS Hard Drives
Here are the key specs you will want to know. First, the SATA III 6.0gbps drives come in 4TB, 6TB and 8TB capacities. Second, the drives are 7200rpm drives. The higher rotational speed makes these drives somewhat more comparable to higher-speed drives like the WD Red Pro rather than the WD Red drive line which runs at lower RPMs.
Perhaps the biggest impact of this release is a choice. The NAS hard drive market has been a duopoly for many years. A third entrant will hopefully put some competition back into the market and be good for consumers.
We do have the drives incoming in the next few weeks and hope to have a review shortly. Please stay tuned for more information about these drives.
Toshiba N300 Specs
Here are the key specs for the Toshiba N300 NAS HDD series:
Capacity: 4TB, 6TB, 8TB
Compatibility: PC and Apple computers with a Serial ATA interface
NAS System Compatibility: View here
Interface: Serial ATA 3.0 (SATA)
Interface Speed: Up to 6 Gbit/s
Form Factor: 3.5 inch
Rotational Speed: 7,200 RPM
Data Transfer Speed (Sustained):
4TB: Up to 200 MB/s Typ.
6TB: Up to 210 MB/s Typ.
8TB: Up to 240 MB/s Typ.
Average Latency Time: 4.17 ms
Buffer Size: 128 MB
MTTF: Up to 1,000,000 hours
Workloads: Up to 180TB/year
Drive Bays Supported: Up to 8 drives
Bottom Mounting Holes Configuration:
4TB: Type 2
6TB: Type 1
8TB: Type 1
Size:
Inch (WxHxL): 4 x 1.03 x 5.79
Milimeter (WxHxL): 101.6 x 26.1 x 147
Weight (max):
4TB: 25.4 oz (720 g)
6TB, 8TB: 27.2 oz (770 g)
If you want to see full specs, you can find the product page here which is the source for the above.
