Toshiba on Thursday said that its latest and largest hard drives for high-end desktops and NASes will be available later this month in the US. The new N300 and X300-series HDDs will offer not only increased capacities, but also provide improved performance.

Available in 12 TB and 14 TB capacities, Toshiba’s latest N300 and X300-series helium-filled hard drives are built around 1.56 TB PMR platters from Showa Denko, with the drives incorporating up to 9 of the platters. The drives generally resemble Toshiba’s enterprise-grade MG07-series HDDs introduced last year: they feature a 7200 RPM spindle speed, a 256 MB cache buffer, and a SATA 6 Gbps interface. As for performance, Toshiba has rated the maximum sustained data transfer speeds for the drives at 260 MB/s for 14 TB models and 253 MB/s for 12 TB SKUs. Power wise, expect the HDDs to consume around 9W.

It is particularly noteworthy that both HDDs feature top and bottom attached motors to minimize vibrations (Toshiba calls the feature Stable Platter Technology). Meanwhile, being aimed at different kinds of applications, the new HDDs are not just rebadged MG07 products. Toshiba’s N300-series 12 TB and 14 TB hard drives for NAS (aka MN07-series) with up to 8 bays are outfitted with rotational vibration (RV) sensors to ensure consistent performance in vibrating multi-drive environments. By contrast, desktop-oriented X300-seires 12 TB and 14 TB HDDs do not have RV sensors since modern desktops hardly use multiple hard drives. Meanwhile, neither of the new HDDs are equipped with environmental sensors, persistent write cache (PWC) with power loss protection (PLP) technology, or other enterprise-grade features.

When it comes to rated workloads and durability, Toshiba’s N300 drives are rated for 24/7 operation, up to 180 TB per year workloads and 1 million-hour MTTF. The X300 HDDs are not officially designed for 24/7 operation, but it still features improved reliability courtesy of its Stable Platter tech and the enterprise nature of the platform. All the new drives will be covered by a three-year limited warranty.

Toshiba’s new N300 and X300-series HDDs will be generally available in the US later this month. The new N300 and X300 hard drives are priced equally despite being slightly different. The 12 TB SKUs cost $429.99, whereas 14 TB models carry a $539.99 price tag.

UPDATE 12/8: Adding official MSRPs of the products.

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Source: Toshiba

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  • Beaver M. - Saturday, December 8, 2018 - link

    For cheap?
  • oRAirwolf - Saturday, December 8, 2018 - link

    The easystore drives are either WD Red NAS drives or white label drives that have all of the features of the Red NAS drives but also include the 3.3 volt pen on the SATA power connector that might need to be disabled with some electrical or kapton tape, depending on your system. The 8 terabyte drives have been as low as $129 and are selling for $149 right now. The 10tb drives were $179 on Black Friday and I believe are still on sale for that price. All you have to do is shuck the drive from the external enclosure and you have yourself an 8 or 10 TB WD red for half price. They are 5400 RPM drives, but due to the areal density of the platters, they still do about 200 megabytes per second sequential. For mass storage there is no better deal. Nothing comes close.
  • evanrich - Sunday, December 9, 2018 - link

    Can confirm. Currently running 18x 8TB Reds (well, like 15 reds +3 whites) in RaidZ2... 144TB raw for <$2400, couldn't come close with anything else.
  • scineram - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link

    That is awfully wide for one vdev. Resilvering must be nail biting, especially with 2 failures.
  • romrunning - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link

    Some say the drives that make it into the external storage devices are not the highest quality. I don't know myself. I do know WD Red drives, though.

    Does it concern you that these drives that you're harvesting might not be the top in regards to quality? Or do you just figure that if you have enough, you can just replace the drives if/when they fail?

    At that price (8TB for basically half retail cost), I think it might be worth it to buy a bunch to harvest enough drives to fill a 4 or 8-bay NAS (no RAID-0).
  • Toddwilliam - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link

    PHLAdvisor is a dedicated and professional provider of repair services. We specialize in repair of products used at home as well as in the office. We provide premium quality home repair services to our valuable and worthy customers.
    https://www.phladvisor.com/
  • gooogleadvisor - Monday, December 10, 2018 - link

    Seagate announced 16 TB hard drive. who can create bigger ?
    SSD actually every month became cheaper and cheaper. SSD it is feature.

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