Toshiba P300 3 TB 7200RPM 3.5 Inch SATA HDD

Quick to install. Build quality is very nice. Nothing else in the box. It is clearly quicker then the Samsung HD103SJ it is replacing although that is an excellent flawless drive.Windows 10 wanted to recognise it as 2 separate drives> I installed it as GUID (GPT) basic type NTFS. It is not for my OS that is on a Crucial 240GB SSD (awesome).I've not speed tested this drive. In everyday use it works as you'd expect but for a HDD it is really fast.The only negative is that is is a bit louder than the other HDD in the PC. They are both in there, the Samsung one is mostly for internal backups now, and the P300 is definitely noisier but doesn't bother us. It doesn't click or thrash about like some HDD, it's the general noise that's a bit louder but it is not intrusive. Not as loud as my fans when they're pushing a lot of air. It is the heaviest HDD I've ever installed.Excellent value and I recommend it. Very happy with it.

I bought a couple of these to replace some 2TB Seagates that live in my PC and have spent the last three years storing and serving up my music and film collection via Plex. It's fair to say that the Seagates have had a hard life and so when one gave up after a power cut last week, I decided to replace them both. These P300s seem to be a fairly recent addition to the Toshiba catalogue which may explain why there isn't much online about their longevity. Nevertheless, at the price I thought I'd take a punt and having them set up in a RAID1 configuration, just as it was with the Seagates, I'd have to be a really Unlucky Alf to lose any data in the event of a failure....Anyway, the disks arrived on time and well packed (each in its own bag, in its own padded box, and then each box in a slightly bigger padded Amazon box). No problem with any of that.I've attached a picture of the label on one of the drives. These are from the HDWD range which, according to the Toshiba website, has a two year warranty. Both the drives I bought were manufactured in April 2016. Installation was unremarkable. The BIOS on my Gigabyte motherboard created the RAID array for me, and I activated the resulting "disk" in the Disk Management area. Windows 10 is quite happy with the arrangement. I then transferred about 1.8TB of data from the remaining Seagate. I could probably have done this by a simple copy and paste, but I didn't want Plex to notice that anything had changed (my concern being that Plex might do a total refresh of my library and lose some of the labelling and artwork I had added). So, instead I used AOEMI Partition to duplicate the existing partition from the remaining Seagate. I mention that here because it meant that within a few minutes of being installed, the P300s were put to work writing 1.8TB of data. I left the operation to complete overnight which it did with no issues at all. I ran a disk check today and everything is sweet. The only other observation I can make right now is that contrary to some other reviews, I have found that these disks are very quiet in operation. The old Seagates were quiet too, although they could just be heard if doing a defrag in the dead of night, for example. For me, the P300s seem to make no noise at all. It may be, then, that much depends on the way in which the disks are installed or what they are installed in - my tower has machined aluminium internals). And that's about as much as I can say right now.UPDATE March 2017:So, I've had these drives in my tower for six months or so. My tower functions solely as a Plex server and due to the strange nocturnal habits of my friends, runs 24/7. The P300s haven't missed a beat and a recent disk check confirms all is well.UPDATE June 2019Possibly tempting fate, but these two drives are still going strong in my 24/7 Plex server. Unfortunately they are getting a bit full so it will soon be time to refresh my set-up and get some larger capacity drives. But more than three years without a hiccup is quite impressive!UPDATE October 2023I never did get around to replacing the drives - I just made some room by deleting a bunch of stuff I no longer needed. However, this update is to report that one of the drives recently failed. I think this happened as a result of a power cut, but otherwise no harm done or data lost as I had my RAID set-up. The remaining drive is in good health so will be put to use elsewhere. I feel like I've had my money's worth out of these drives. I've now replaced both with a pair of 8TB Toshiba X300 drives.

My Seagate Barracuda 2TB failed after 3 years of 24/7 use and I decided on buying this drive as a replacement. I was tempted to go for the WD Black, but the price/GB ratio on this drive is hard to beat, and after doing some research online, the performance seemed pretty good as well. I've included the scores it got on CrystalDiskMark in my picture.It's a tad louder than some of the drives I've used in the past, but not annoyingly so. I use it as a storage drive (for everything that's not the OS), and it copes well under heavy load.If you are using this drive in Win10 you'll have to go into Disk Management and change it to a GPT disk as Windows will recognise it as two separate drives (2TB and 746GB), after doing this it'll show as a single drive (formatted capacity is 2.72TB). I'll update this review if I run into any problems or issues with the drive later on down the line, but so far so good.

Comes in a sealed, unassuming cardboard box that has some padding inside, wrapped in a anti-static bag.In spite of the basic packaging, the hard drive itself is working quite well!I've got this drive for over a year now and it is still going strong, no read/write errors reported or any sort of problems. Read/write access can be a bit on the louder side sometimes but that is totally expected for a mechanical hard drive, so if you are used to having some very quiet drives (like I was with my Hitachi HDD), this is totally fine.This hard drive, as far as I understand from my research, uses PMR tech rather than SMR tech like most Seagate HDDs which allows them to have higher capacity for the same physical footprint, but this causes more wear when writing to the disk which puts a risk on reliability and longevity. It was because of this small worry that I wanted a drive that still used PMR tech that is from a reputable hard drive manufacturer, and this hard drive fits that criteria.So if you are on the hunt for a hard drive with this particular need in mind, I would recommend this.