N300 8TB NAS 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive - CMR SATA 6 GB/s 7200 RPM 256 MB Cache - HDWG180XZSTA

First, an important notice for all buyers of these internal hard drives: These internal drives were really meant for use by OEM manufacturers or for those (e.g., professional builders of custom computers) who know and follow proper ESD-protection procedures when handling these drives. If you handle or touch them improperly, you can cause ESD damage to the internal circuits of these drives, rendering them inoperable immediately or some time later (known as latent damage, which is an important cause of reduced reliability of the drives), depending on the nature of the damage you caused. You cannot handle and touch them like other consumer electronic devices. You need to follow proper ESD-protection procedures. Since, by default, these drives were intended to be used by those know how to properly handle them, the manufacturers do not typically include ESD warnings other than the anti-static bags that they come packaged in. The insidious nature of ESD means that the damage can manifest itself in many different ways, so no two ESD-damaged drives will malfunction in identical ways. When I see people reporting hard drive failures and they are different, especially if there are multiple failures being reported by the same person (especially if that same person reports dead on power-on for multiple drives, whether they were bought at the same or at different times), that is an important clue that ESD damage due to improper handling was the most likely cause of the failures. The fact that ESD does not always cause immediate failures or problems (but, instead, can cause latent damages which can cause the drive to prematurely fail sooner than the manufacturer's expected life expectancy) unfortunately misleads consumers into false beliefs that they are not causing problems when they do not follow proper ESD-protection procedures. The above notice comes from my experience as an engineer working for a company that uses ESD-sensitive devices in our products. The company sells to a major customer that uses the products for life-critical applications, where a failure of our product can kill people. (Our products also have internal self-test and diagnostic functions built in to warn of any possible impending failures of internal components, so that the customer can respond before the product actually fails.) For regular consumers like you, that, of course, does not necessarily apply. So you can choose to do whatever you want with the above ESD warning. And, yes, I do understand that vast majority of the consumers like to feel empowered or do not want to pay extra by installing or using these drives themselves. But do note that if you do not know or follow the proper ESD-protection procedures when handling the hard drives, the drives' MTBF specifications go out the window, which means you can no longer rely on the level of reliability that was designed into them by the manufacturer. The reliability then becomes unknown and most likely will be worse than what they came with before you touched them. And, yes, in case you're wondering, I do follow proper ESD-protection procedures when I handle internal hard drives. Now, on to my review of the Toshiba hard drive. Unlike most people, my most important criterion for a hard drive is not performance but reliability. I save files that are important and valuable to me for various reasons. So not losing those files is more important to me than other criteria like the read/write speeds. (For those who say that NAS can mitigate failures of individual drives, I agree. But I also care about the reliabilities of individual drives since, if too many of the them fail within a certain amount of time, even a NAS cannot help you. But that's just me.) I originally used Seagate and WD drives years ago. I discovered that most of them failed much sooner than they should have, based on the manufacturers' claims. It seemed that the drives were not made using proper procedures. (I know what kind of QA shortcuts that managers of manufacturing plants can take if they are under pressure from the HQ.) So I began searching online for hard drive brand reliabilities and discovered that HGST was highly rated. During years of using their internal hard drives, not a single one failed on me. This was refreshing after my experience with the Seagate and WD drives. But after HGST stopped operations as an independent company after WD acquired it, I needed to find a different brand. I was not going to trust WD again. One day I discovered the Toshiba brand of internal hard drives. At that time, there weren't many reviews of those drives. So I decided to take a chance and try them out. I first tried their 4TB drives and now I'm using their 8TB drives. I've been using them for several years now. None has failed on me so far, except for one that came in very badly damaged box (the one that the drive was packaged in; the box itself was shipped in a flimsy plastic bag). That one failed to format and made strange noises, almost as if the internal mechanical moving parts were grinding against themselves. Amazon replaced it very quickly and the replacement has worked flawlessly.

I am using two of these in my Isilon NL400 running TrueNAS Core (12.0-U1). I bought twelve Barracuda 8TB drives (which I expected to die) in order to make a zpool with the expectation to swap the garbage Barracudas with decent drives over time. So far these Toshiba drives are working as expected and are CMR. Resilvering went quickly and they are still working. It is difficult to say whether or not they have longevity since these are fairly new. If they die in a time shorter than expected I will update the review. The price is probably the cheapest of the NAS grade drives that you can purchase at the time.

Buying Hard Drives for some of us is like purchasing a commodity. I needed 8 drives (8Tb) for a Raid Array and I wanted the Toshiba NAS drives. Toshiba makes an excellent product and I have used their drives in many devices for both commercial and personal situations. But, the reason I am writing this review is this: Since the supply chain is all screwed up, I was worried about getting product. I ordered these from the "SmartBazaar" vendor (this link) on a Tuesday night , they shipped on Wednesday, FROM SINGAPORE(surprise) , they arrived in Hawaii on Thursday, Memphis/Richmond on Friday and delivered to me on Monday.(6 days) - The drives were packed in sealed individual OEM boxes, inside sealed Boxes of 4 from the OEM factory in the Philippines. They were packed extremely well and all are happily at work in my new Raid. Considering I have trouble getting US Mail across town in that same time period. I am certain if needed the customer support from Smart Bazaar, it would be available with the same professionalism. I can recommend Toshiba based on my history using their product.. and SmartBazaar, based on the experience above.

I bought three of these on sale to upgrade my home NAS. So far, I have had to return two because of early mortality. This is what smartctl reports after less than 2 weeks of use: === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Device Model: TOSHIBA HDWG180 Serial Number: XXXXXXXXXXXX LU WWN Device Id: XXXXXXXXXXXX Firmware Version: 0603 User Capacity: 8,001,563,222,016 bytes [8.00 TB] Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical Rotation Rate: 7200 rpm Form Factor: 3.5 inches Device is: Not in smartctl database [for details use: -P showall] ATA Version is: ACS-3 T13/2161-D revision 5 SATA Version is: SATA 3.3, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s) Local Time is: Sat Jan 1 05:54:21 2022 PST SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability. SMART support is: Enabled === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED! Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA. See vendor-specific Attribute list for failed Attributes. General SMART Values: Offline data collection status: (0x82) Offline data collection activity was completed without error. Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled. Self-test execution status: ( 73) The previous self-test completed having a test element that failed and the test element that failed is not known. Total time to complete Offline data collection: ( 120) seconds. Offline data collection capabilities: (0x5b) SMART execute Offline immediate. Auto Offline data collection on/off support. Suspend Offline collection upon new command. Offline surface scan supported. Self-test supported. No Conveyance Self-test supported. Selective Self-test supported. SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering power-saving mode. Supports SMART auto save timer. Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported. General Purpose Logging supported. Short self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes. Extended self-test routine recommended polling time: ( 836) minutes. SCT capabilities: (0x003d) SCT Status supported. SCT Error Recovery Control supported. SCT Feature Control supported. SCT Data Table supported. SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16 Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds: ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE 1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 050 Pre-fail Always - 0 2 Throughput_Performance 0x0005 100 100 050 Pre-fail Offline - 0 3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 100 100 001 Pre-fail Always - 3385 4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 9 5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 050 Pre-fail Always - 0 7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000b 043 043 050 Pre-fail Always FAILING_NOW 0 8 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0005 100 100 050 Pre-fail Offline - 0 9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 289 10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0033 100 100 030 Pre-fail Always - 0 12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 4 191 G-Sense_Error_Rate 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1 193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 24 194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 44 (Min/Max 21/51) 196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0 199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0 220 Disk_Shift 0x0002 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 134479921 222 Loaded_Hours 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 172 223 Load_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 224 Load_Friction 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0 226 Load-in_Time 0x0026 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 531 240 Head_Flying_Hours 0x0001 100 100 001 Pre-fail Offline - 0 SMART Error Log Version: 1 No Errors Logged SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1 Num Test_Description Status Remaining LifeTime(hours) LBA_of_first_error # 1 Short offline Completed: unknown failure 90% 289 0 # 2 Extended offline Completed without error 00% 12 - SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1 SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS 1 0 0 Not_testing 2 0 0 Not_testing 3 0 0 Not_testing 4 0 0 Not_testing 5 0 0 Not_testing Selective self-test flags (0x0): After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk. If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay. Stay away from these if you can. The competitors are priced significantly higher, but I guess you get what you pay for.

The first drive was a dud, looked like box was dropped and drive damaged. The amount drives being returned i don't get how Amazon or the vendor don't take care of the drives. Anyhow, replacement drive arrived a few days later. Homeserver picked it up and just works. Transfer speeds are amazing, at times i get 15-20 seconds bursts of over 230Mb/s, fastest drive I own. As far as noise, its in the server along bunch of other drives, it's not any louder than any of the other ones. When spools full speed, yeah you can hear it a bit more, nothing excessive. It does run a few degrees cooler than Seagate drives, and has bit less airflow than the Seagates and Hitachi drives. It's been a great drive, waiting a bit and will get 2 more.

En mi equipo nisiquiera noto el ruido de los hdd. Desempeño muy bueno, es mejor que seagate. Tengo 3 toshiba de 6, 4, 3 años y ninguno han fallado. Este modelo particularmente es silencioso y con uso rudo de carga y descarga constante no ha dado un solo problema. Velocidad de transferencia como se indica casi la ideal en mi sistema.

Para construir tus propios NAS con una RASPBERRY

Todo bien lo envian con protección de burbuja,

UPDATE: Toshiba has offered me a "full refund" in USD which excludes Taxes. So, after 50 days of processing, I pay the taxes, the shipping, and I'm refunded in a different currency. If it weren't for Zotac, this would be the worst experience I've ever had with RMA. I just had a drive fail just before the three year warranty period is over. Toshiba assured me I would be getting a replacement drive over the phone, but they have decided to refund the original price I paid for it three years ago instead. I now have to pay about $30 for shipping, then order a replacement hard drive for $35 more than I spent for it. I don't understand why they couldn't just honor the warranty. I'm not as upset as I could be, but it's a serious letdown to force me to purchase a more expensive product when the cheaper product fails. They could have at least honored the price. As far as the quality goes, they seem fine. I only had 1 of 4 drives fail, and never in my life has a hard drive failed on me before. Hoping I can resilver before the next one fails though.