Fastest hard drive I have used yet close to SSD speeds, this one does 200MB+ read/write and 185MB average sustained seeds. The previous fastest drive I used was the 2TB seagate which had an average sustained speed of 160MB. They both use the 1TB platters but it seems the Toshiba is faster for some reason even though they both spin at 7200 RPM and both have SATA3 interfaces.
The thing I mainly liked about the Toshiba was that you could remove the drive from the USB case and connect it to the computer and read the data, you can not do that with the Seagate. The 3TB drive I bought last year will either work in the USB case or on the computer since it uses 4K sectors and you can format it as MBR in the USB case to see the entire drive but moving it to the computer shows an empty drive but you can NOT format it on the computer as MBR to see the entire drive. So it was a GPT setup on the computer or MBR setup on the USB case and that made me nervous that if I kept it in the case in case of trouble I would not be able to use the motherboard to try to read the data and that is imperative as I have found when the drive fails the USB case locks up and stops you from retrieving any data at all but the motherboard controller is easier to work with, I would also need another USB case in case one went bad to even look at the drive. Although the drive will lock up even on the motherboard, you can at least get SOME of the data while the USB case will just lose all your data.
The Toshiba does not do translations so it works the same on the mother board or in the USB case but you need to format it as GPT format to see the entire space, so it wont be compatible with some older stuff. I had a hard time with the advanced format translations done by the USB interface as mentioned above and the problems of varying speeds when crossing sector boundaries. I get 100K WRITE speeds on the 3TB Seagate, and 50MB read speeds.. Go figure.. The speeds vary widely for any and all reasons. 50MB means 12 hours to copy a 3Tb drive.. 100MB means it does it in 6 hours..
The drive does come with 128MB cache so that helps but 128MB is smaller than most files but its great when reading a whole bunch of very small files. The drive is also very cool running. It got to 50C in the case after an hour of heavy work so I had a fan blowing on it and it went down to 45C, I could not get the Seagate to lower its temperature like that since the vents are in the back which is blowing air into the USB chip and not the drive itself so the Toshiba will work cooler, inside the computer the drive is running cooler as well, it runs cooler than even the Seagate green drives which was surprising since this is a very fast speedy drive.
Although my micron SSD writes at 275MB which is not much faster than the 210MB with the hard drive, it is more than 10 times faster in random access. AS SSD almost took 10 minutes to get through the test but sequential access and copy speeds is almost as fast as lower end SSD's.. You notice how long it takes to load windows with those 250GB hard drives and on lap tops.. And then SSD's blows away those load times, well this hard drive comes in close to that but you start reading a whole bunch of small files and it slows down drastically like if you have 200 windows in opera that opens using 20,000 cached images and icons on the drive. But until that time it seems fast. I love this drive. Its been a long time something lived upto my expectations and did not throw up unseen problems. I was really surprised it came with a 12V 3Amp power supply, all the others come with 1.5A or 2A occasionally.. Even though the drive does not use more power than other hard drives, it might take more juice to start up the 5 platter drive up to speed faster.. I saw they were coming out with the 6TB drive at the end of the month. I thought of waiting but I dont want to test a new design before its debugged by others. It takes weeks to move 6TB of data. A problem and you can spend months trying to get data off. The reliability rating is worth the $20 more than comparable drives and it is faster than the rest as well and runs cooler, all a winning combination.
| Hard Drive | 5 TB External |
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