The need for space to save your data is growing year by year. Just think of how many images and how many videos we accumulate on our smartphones, or the increasing size of games, not to mention the professionals, who often deal with large files. SSDs have revolutionized the way we use the PC, making everything much faster than mechanical solutions, but speed has a price and that price is less space available.
512 GB and 1 TB SSDs have reached affordable prices, but if you go beyond this threshold the costs increase exponentially, that's why mechanical hard drives are still in circulation. Less speed but much more space available, a compromise necessary to offer many TB in a single memory. Toshiba X300 looks exactly in this direction, providing 14 TB to save everything you want at a recommended price of € 529.00.
Technical characteristics and performances
Toshiba X300 is a 3.5 "and 7200 rpm mechanical hard disk with SATA III interface. The version we tested is from 14 TB overall, but models from 4 to 16 TB are available, which differ not only in size but also for some features, for example the 12, 14 and 16 TB variants they use helium inside them, which having a lower molecular density than air decreases friction, with a consequent reduction in consumption and noise. Compared to the smaller cuts, the 12 and 14 Tb variants offer a buffer of 256 MB, against 128 MB of the others; the only one to differentiate further is the 16 TB one, which has a 512 MB buffer. Toshiba ensures this disk runs for 600,000 hours.
The sales package is very basic, in the package there is only the hard disk, well protected by a plastic wrap, and the instruction manual.
But what can a disk of this type be useful for? The types of use for a 14 TB hard drive are varied, we switch from workstations to home multimedia servers, obviously passing through gaming.
The new generation consoles are going in another direction with faster memories at the expense of the available space. 1 TB may seem like a lot but the size of the games is growing, while the Italian internet lines are not always up to par: the result is that today we often have huge game libraries that are not immediately accessible.
With 14 TB available, you can install dozens of games without problems, a choice that, according to your needs, can be considered sensible, even at the expense of longer loading times.
On the performance front, in fact, this Toshiba X300 aligns with other similar products, the rest of the mechanical hard drives have limits that cannot be exceeded. We are therefore faced with a memory that travels around 250 MB / s in sequential reading and writing, far from the performance of a SATA III SSD and even more different from those of the NVMe M.2 memories.
