Toshiba P300 3TB HDD review

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

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  • 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

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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


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.

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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.


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

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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.


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

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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.


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

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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.


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

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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.


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.


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