Toshiba N300 4TB NAS 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive - CMR SATA 6 GB/s 7200 RPM 128 MB Cache - HDWQ140XZSTA

I purchased four of these for a Synology NAS years ago. Several years later, I purchased another one that was meant to be a spare. Because of the quality and reliability, the spare is still in a drawer in the original box and I am retiring the NAS. They functioned well in my Synology and have outlived it. With four of these running, the NAS is still quiet.

I have recently decided to invest in a NAS device for my Plex Server and decided on the Asustor 4 bay NAS. I was trying not to brake the bank since I needed 4 hard drives to fill the NAS so I did a lot of comparing between Western Digital and Seagate who tend to be the most popular.For around the same price as the WD Red Plus, which has 5400 rpm you can get this hard drive with 7200 RPM with the same amount of storage. It is hard to review a hard drive since all it does is hold data, but for the price, Toshiba was the obvious choice.This drive is a little bit noisy, but that is to be expected on the 7200 RPM drives vs the slower 5400 RPM drives. It also could have to do with the particular NAS I purchased since it has a metal enclosure instead of a plastic which would dull the noise a little.Setup was a breeze, all of my drives are up and functional. I decided to buy 3 6TB drives and add a 4th later when storage is necessary. Of course every hard drive has the possibility of failure so that cannot really be a good gauge unless of course your drives is dead out of the box in which case its probably a defective unit.I am very happy with this purchase and will use Toshiba drives in the future as they provide better value for the money and equal performance.

I bought this HDD to replace an older Toshiba. I saw a few negative reviews, but since they all had an older post date, I hoped that whatever kinks were there, Toshiba corrected them. In addition, this HDD is used by the big data companies such as Google and their reports on it were encouraging.So far, my HDD (8tb version) performs as expected: no noise, no heat, no problems. I do keep it in an external enclosure, away from the heat of my workstation, but don't know if that was truly necessary. Knowing that heat kills any HDD, with the only question being "how quickly?", I prefer to keep my important HDDs cool. To do that, you can buy one of those docking stations hook it up via USB3 and your HDDs will perform without a glitch for many years to come (Very likely to exceed their usually MTBF).Again: no noise, no heat, no problems, just as I expected from Toshiba.

TL:DR for the people in hurry,Buy it. A certain portion of drives from any manufacturer will fail. It's lottery that nobody wants to win. Toshiba drives have the lowest failure rate in the year of use of all drive manufactures. If you have used electronics for long you know that if something is going to fail it will most likely be in the first year.For those not in a hurry:I have 4 of these installed in my home server. The OS is Ubuntu 18.04 and the drives are formatted in a btrfs RAID10.How long have owned them?It's been 10moths since I bought them..How noisy is it?For me, not very noisy at all. I have a good case, a great PSU, a good motherboard, and I am using Linux. A good case means that it has solid HDD mounts that will not rattle as the drive vibrates because it is spinning. It also means that the drives are mounted close to a fan to keep them cool. A great PSU means that the drives always get the a steady and reliable amount of power so they spin at the same speed 24/7. A good motherboard means that SATA controller has a great driver which is what controls the drives as they spin. Linux means that most HDD's are going to make more noise than on Windows because Linux will cache disk writes in RAM for several seconds to several minutes and then do all the writes at once.How many non-recoverable bad sectors did These drives have out of the box?Two. On four drives, two non-recoverable bad sectors out of the box.How many non-recoverable bad sectors these drives have after 10 months of being powered on 24/7?Two.That's my review.

The P/N of this 6TB N300 NAS drive with 128 MB cache is HDWE160XZSTA. The 256 MB version's P/N is HDWG160XZSTA. This is also a short term review with about a week's worth of workstation level activity. Keep in mind mechanical (and even SSD) drives **WILL** fail eventually. Best to have a backup and rotate out old drives every few years. Treat drives as consumables with limited life.tl;dr: the drive is, well, it spins up, stores the data put to it, and able to read it back correctly. It is relatively quiet. No louder than other 7200RPM drives, but you're unlikely to forget that it is sitting there on your desk. The fan on your enclosure will likely be louder than the drive motor, but the noise is additive.Drop test to test the shock sensor:Ha ha. Funny. Um, no. Don't drop your drive while it is on if at all possible. Spinning rust on metal/glass plates with read/write heads a hair's diameter distance from that surface subject to sudden high g and power lost is likely a non-recoverable event.Which model should you get?Is the extra $15-$25 for the extra cache worth it? It depends if your workflow produce files that is larger than the cache of the drive.If your data is made up mostly of spreadsheets and word processing or other smaller files. You are better off with the lesser cache as you are unlikely to take advantage of the larger cache.If you do minor image editing (crop, levels, curves, color grading) with relatively few image layers and RAW to JPEG conversions, you'll likely benefit from the extra cache.If you do heavy duty image editing/composition with multiple image layers and/or video editing, you'll likely not get too much benefit out of the caches as you'll more than likely overwhelm them with your file sizes.