Toshiba AL14SX 15000RPM SAS eHDD RAID Review

Bohs Hansen / 7 years ago

Final Thoughts

Pricing

Toshiba’s AL14SX is quite new and as such not really available yet. A few shops here and there have it listed, but not in stock. The prices vary between €441 and €506 when searching through Geizhals.

Conclusion

Toshiba’s AL14SX series is built for mission-critical data, there’s no doubt about that. With that said, it’s clear that these drives rarely will run as a single drive. Thanks to a slight mixup, I ended up with two drives, which allows me to show you how the drives perform in a simple RAID setup. With it, we get a view at how well the drives scale.

After the initial 1-drive review, it was very clear that we’re dealing with a drive that’s outside the normal class. Most HDDs will have a significant performance impact as the heads have to move further on the surface, but not the AL14SX. Thanks to the small size, fast spindle speed, and great engineering, the AL14SX keeps up the pace across the entire surface. With that in mind, I was very curious how well it would stack in a RAID setup. I went into this article with high hopes, and I wasn’t disappointed. We saw a scaling of nearly 100%, and that’s really impressive. Now, the performance will depend on the setup type, but that’s a given for any drive. With the SAS controller’s advanced features, such as read-ahead and write caching, there are even higher performance possibilities.

With a main focus on the performance, we shouldn’t forget the other features who make this drive great. It packs an incredible low access time for a mechanical drive as well as Toshiba’s power-loss protection. Even in the event of a catastrophic power failure, the drives will be able to flush the internally cached data to the drive.

Pros

Impressive RAID scaling of the already high performance
High-compatibility form factor
12Gbps SAS interface
15000 RPM spindle speed
Industry-leading 2ms drive latency

Cons

Availability (at the time of review)

“Toshiba’s AL14SX impressed us as a single drive, but even more so in a RAID setup. Impressive scaling allows for extreme high-performance setups for your mission-critical data.”