Toshiba N300 MN10ADA800S NAS hard drive 8 TB, 3.5" SATA, 7200 rpm, 512 MB

N300 is the Toshiba drive family for network storage, designed to stay in service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Toshiba tuned it for the reliability, endurance and performance that high-capacity storage needs at home, in a home office and in a small business. The drive suits NAS units with 1 to 8 bays, desktop RAID arrays, multimedia servers, private cloud storage and small business servers.

The platters spin at 7200 rpm and the sustained transfer rate reaches 281 MB/s. The 512 MB buffer and Toshiba Dynamic Cache Technology help serve requests from several users at the same time more quickly. The SATA III interface carries up to 6 Gbit/s, so the link is never the bottleneck. For comparison, an ordinary gigabit network carries less than the sustained speed of the drive, so in a NAS the network becomes the limit, not the disk.

Toshiba Stable Platter Technology steadies the spinning platters, which matters in a multi-drive enclosure where vibration travels from neighbouring drives. The drive monitors its own temperature and has a high-endurance design. Toshiba rates it for 300,000 start/stop cycles. The operating range is 5–60 °C and storage temperature runs from −40 to 70 °C, so it stays within limits even in a warm server cabinet.

Error Recovery Control limits how long the drive keeps retrying a hard-to-read sector. A typical desktop drive can spend so long on this that the RAID controller assumes it has failed and drops it from the array. The N300 reports the error quickly instead, and the array rebuilds the data from the other drives. SMART support lets the NAS software watch the drive health and warn you before a problem becomes serious.

The drive uses 5.74 W at idle and 9.07 W in typical operation. Like any standard 3.5-inch drive it takes power from the 5 V and 12 V rails. It measures 147 × 101.85 × 26.1 mm and weighs 755 g, so it fits NAS drive trays and the regular 3.5-inch bay of a desktop PC. The 180 TB per year workload limit is the combined volume of data written and read that the drive is rated for.

Home users building or expanding their own NAS who want a drive meant for 24/7 operation; small businesses whose file server and backups run around the clock; photographers and video makers keeping an archive in a RAID array; and enthusiasts putting together a media server or private cloud who want 8 TB in a single drive.