XSReviews

Looking for a hard drive to store your legal downloads? This 3 TB drive from Toshiba is the top result on Amazon right now, making it a promising candidate for anyone looking to solve their disk space woes once and for all — at least for a couple of years, anyway! Let’s see if it’s earned that top Amazon place — here’s our review of the Toshiba P300 3TB hard drive!

Specifications & Design

• Format: 3.5-inch SATA drive
• Capacities: 0.5 TB / 1TB / 2TB / 3TB
• Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM
• Buffer: 64MB
• Dimensions: 147 x 101.6 x 26.1 mm
• Weight: 680 grams
• Warranty: 2 years

Features: Shock sensor, Native Command Queuing (NCQ), Halogen Free, Tunnel Magneto-resistive Recording (TMR) Head Technology, Ramp Load, Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR), Advanced Format technology, Dual Stage Actuator (DSA), Data Protection Technology

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Benchmarks

We’ll be comparing the P300 against our previous contenders, including internal and external drives, to see how it stacks up against the competition.

We’ll be testing the drive in our XSR test rig, which has a Core i5 6600K processor, 16GB of Crucial DDR4 RAM and runs Windows 10.

Thanks to NZXT for providing the Manta case and Kraken X61 liquid cooler. Thanks to Samsung for providing the Evo 850 M.2 boot drive. Thanks to Zoostorm and Crucial for providing the DDR4 RAM.

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CrystalDiskMark

CrystalDiskMark has been one of my favourite benchmarks for evaluating storage speeds for a while now, thanks to its varied incompressible workload and extremely readable results. Here’s the 3.0.3 x64 version of the benchmark; all results are in MB/s.

CDM 3 Read	Seq	512K	4K	4K QD32
Toshiba P300 HDD	150	48	0.6	1.6
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	115	38	0.6	2.5
Toshiba Canvio Premium	118	43	0.5	0.6
Samsung T3	386	351	33	35
Sandisk Z410	508	357	13	146
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	502	447	45	368
Samsung 850 Evo	513	472	38	408
Samsung 840 Evo	515	473	35	397
Corsair Neutron GTX	450	376	27	328

 

CDM 3 Write	Seq	512K	4K	4K QD32
Toshiba P300 HDD	155	69	0.6	1.0
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	114	52	22	24
Toshiba Canvio Premium	117	50	1.3	1.3
Samsung T3	357	352	69	77
Sandisk Z410	407	355	97	250
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	474	394	113	316
Samsung 850 Evo	504	479	68	352
Samsung 840 Evo	500	390	86	313
Corsair Neutron GTX	480	468	69	158

The P300 performs as expected in the test, providing reasonably fast read and write speeds for sequential data (e.g. large files) of about 150 MB/s. That’s about three times slower than most of the SSDs we’ve tested, which is not bad at all for a mechanical disk. In fact, it’s the fastest mechanical drive we’ve tested recently.

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AS SSD Benchmark

AS SSD is another benchmarking tool quite similar to CrystalDiskMark, which uses predominantly incompressible data across a range of workloads including sequential tests, random performance and access times. First three numbers are MB/s and access time is in ms.

AS SSD Read	Seq	4K	4K QD64	Acc. Time	Score
Toshiba P300 HDD	155	0.5	1.6	N/A	18
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	73	1.8	15	26.3	15
Toshiba Canvio Premium	113	0.5	0.6	23.021	12
Samsung T3	345	24	32	0.100	91
Sandisk Z410	501	11	145	0.045	206
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	493	40	328	0.093	417
Samsung 850 Evo	516	34	382	0.059	467
Samsung 840 Evo	513	32	330	0.059	413
Corsair Neutron GTX	507	25	334	0.068	N/A

 

AS SSD Write	Seq	4K	4K QD64	Acc. Time	Score
Toshiba P300 HDD	114	0.5	0.6	16.7	13
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	46	19	5	18.2	39
Toshiba Canvio Premium	111	0.5	0.5	17.6	12
Samsung T3	367	56	71	0.055	163
Sandisk Z410	407	78	215	0.237	333
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	475	95	251	0.075	393
Samsung 850 Evo	497	66	299	0.051	415
Samsung 840 Evo	497	69	207	0.054	326
Corsair Neutron GTX	473	62	295	0.062	N/A

We got a repeated error message when trying to measure the read access time, so that measurement has been omitted. In any case, the sequential read and write speeds are impressive, and are in keeping with our other results.

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ATTO Disk Benchmark

ATTO produces rather less comprehensible results than CrystalDiskMark, but still provides a good test of compressible data transfer. It also provides a lot of data points; I’ve selected six from across the range. Settings were the default: 256MB total length and queue depth of 4, testing from 1KB to 8MB. All results are in MB/s.

Atto Read	1KB	4KB	64KB	256KB	1MB	8MB
Toshiba P300 HDD	27	85	129	123	135	190
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	9	20	26	26	26	26
Toshiba Canvio Premium	9	33	117	117	117	118
Samsung T3	18	67	329	371	377	404
Sandisk Z410	78	247	518	531	536	533
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	83	286	537	553	552	553
Samsung 850 Evo	80	269	538	551	558	558
Samsung 840 Evo	94	280	535	551	555	555
Corsair Neutron GTX	15	61	336	452	530	540

 

Atto Write	1KB	4KB	64KB	256KB	1MB	8MB
Toshiba P300 HDD	16	74	120	113	123	128
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	3	25	37	55	53	53
Toshiba Canvio Premium	10	41	115	115	116	116
Samsung T3	20	71	315	365	366	388
Sandisk Z410	69	184	419	423	426	428
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	79	251	510	526	525	525
Samsung 850 Evo	83	255	519	529	534	534
Samsung 840 Evo	81	260	515	527	533	534
Corsair Neutron GTX	15	142	474	470	493	498

The Atto test gives a better idea of how performance changes across a range of data sizes. Read and writes speeds were largely between three and four times as slow as our test SSDs at larger sizes (e.g. 1MB and above), but results at 32KB were also pretty reasonable — 118 MB/s writing and 134 MB/s reading. Curiously, performance dipped after 32KB, and didn’t reach these levels again until the 512KB size test — weird. Still, it’s an encouraging result for a 7200 RPM drive, and perhaps speaks to the laundry list of features Toshiba included.

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HD Tune Pro

We conclude with HD Tune Pro, a benchmark which produces three scores for average read speed, read access time, and burst read rate.

 

HD Tune Pro 5.50 Read	Average	Access Time	Burst Rate
Toshiba P300 HDD	126 MB/s	14.6 ms	294 MB/s
Toshiba H200 Hybrid	90 MB/s	16.9 ms	87 MB/s
Toshiba Canvio Premium	114 MB/s	17.9 ms	140 MB/s
Samsung T3	269 MB/s	0.090 ms	171 MB/s
Sandisk Z410	358 MB/s	0.035 ms	140 MB/s
Samsung 850 Evo M.2	321 MB/s	0.087 ms	221 MB/s
Samsung 850 Evo	370 MB/s	0.044 ms	250 MB/s
Samsung 840 Evo	358 MB/s	0.041 ms	231 MB/s
Corsair Neutron GTX	340 MB/s	0.059 ms	231 MB/s

The P300 displays a lot of variance in its transfer rates, as you can see by the zig-zagging line above. Even compared to past HDDs, it’s quite different. However, the 294 MB/s burst rate and 126 MB/s average transfer rate is commendable, on the upper end of what we’d expect from a modern HDD. Access times are also slightly lower than expected, coming in just under 15 ms.

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Wrap-up

The Toshiba P300 is an excellent modern hard drive that boasts strong performance at a very reasonable price. With recent price drops pushing the P300’s price south of $80 (£65), the drive has become even better value.