Toshiba Launches 4TB and 6TB N300 NAS HDDs

Toshiba released a new hard drive series called the N300 and the new series is similar to the X300 series that I recently reviewed. However, where the X300 was a desktop hard disk drive, the N300 is designed for use in NAS devices. Toshiba optimised the drive for performance, reliability, endurance, and scalability requirements of 24-hour x 7-day operation – as you’d expect.

The new N300 series is designed for use in up to 8-bay enclosures and comes with advanced control and sensing technologies to mitigate the effect of vibration, shock, and heat. There are multiple shock sensors which detect and compensate for shock and rotational vibration and error recovery control that minimises recovery time from data errors. Other features include the Toshiba Stable Platter technology where a tied spindle motor stabilises the motor drive shaft at both ends to kerb system-induced vibration. Use of high-endurance components ensures durability in harsh environments and reliability is further supported through Toshiba’s Ramp Load technology that reduces disk head wear and tear.

The N300 series are offered with capacity options of 4 TB and 6 TB, and both versions feature a 128 MB data buffer. They spin their disks with 7200 RPM and can perform with up to 210MB/s sustained transfer speeds and 4.17ms access latency. The workload rating is set at 180TB a year, which is around 500MB a day, and the mean time before failure is rated at 1 million hours. Warranty wise, the N300 is backed by a 3-year coverage.

Faster spinning drives also produce a bit more noise than the slower 5400 RPM drives, that’s a given. Toshiba’s N300 series is rated for 30 dB and 33 dB for the 4TB and 6TB versions.