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HDD Brand - Toshiba
Hello,
I'm planning to purchase a 2-3 year supply of HDD for both server and cold storage (backup) use, anticipating further price increases driven by hyperscaler (AI) infrastructure demand. Currently, I'm using Seagate and WD's enterprise and NAS lines, but I haven't used Toshiba beside few of their external drives.
Given the current market situation, I'm now seriously considering Toshiba's enterprise and NAS SKUs (MG series, N300, etc) since they're 20-40% cheaper.
Should I continue avoiding Toshiba, or is it worth giving them a shot?
Comments
Regards
Have a look at the backblaze reports to see hard drive failures
https://www.backblaze.com/blog/backblaze-drive-stats-for-q3-2025/
Stop planning and buy it as soon as possible.
https://www.heise.de/en/news/WD-and-Seagate-confirm-Hard-drives-for-2026-sold-out-11178917.html
I think only Toshiba can supply some server HD in 2026...
My external drives from Toshiba (consumer hw) haven't failed me yet.
Yeah. But ~16% AFR of MG08ACA16TEY is disheartening. Their Toshiba fleet is relatively new (37 months old on average).
Thank you for your concern. Excluding reading this forum, I'm just few clicks away from ordering the drive.
Thanks.
Toshiba is already a well-known OEM for some server brand disk parts. I think some (or most) OEM disk I myself saw from HPE and DELL are from Toshiba. You can't really go wrong with it.
I personally have a couple of Toshiba SAS SSD but no HDD.
@rpqu
For SATA drives, you can definitely go with them. We already bought several 22TB and 24TB units last year, and again this year.
If we compare enterprise SAS vs SATA, honestly at this point I don’t have high expectations for anything above 14TB to last the full warranty period anymore. QC has gone downhill across the board in pretty much every industry.
Because of that, we’ve switched to buying only brand new drives with full 60-month warranty, even if it means paying the premium.
Also, over the last 6–8 months, the price gap between used drives (up to ~2 years old) and new drives is only around 30%, and it keeps shrinking. At that point, buying used simply doesn’t make much sense anymore. - Especially on the larger ones above 18 TB.
It's a recurring theme across the industry (error tolerance ranging from mm to μm). The management want to increase profit, so they skipped some steps or reduce the batch sample to the point defective devices are shipped to customer. Because everyone does it, then it's a fair game.
This troubles me since I'm expecting them to last >10 years like late 2000s - early 2010s disks. It stupefy me when consumer grade nvme only last 3 years for desktop usage.
I have purchased used drives, but I never use them to hold data that hasn't been replicated elsewhere.
need som 2.5 inch SAS 146 GB drives, i think we did not throw all all of them out, damn, they are still alive and kicking, no bad sectors, not errors they just work.
Damn again, I think we still have a FC shelve in the basement with 450 GB FC drives, last time I checked, they were fine....
Basement..... Reminds me, have to feed the dino guest......
@fat32 - Dinner time
LOL, when I saw green dino, I instantly thought of @FAT32.
Yes, those drives have outlasted entire generations of newer models.
It really makes me think, is the cost reduction the real culprit. Is it He or HAMR which is less suited for long-term storage?
as a note here.
Personally I don’t buy too much into the NAS/Enterprise marketing segmentation ( in SATA drives ) — a lot of it is firmware tuning and warranty positioning - AKA Gymics
For backup storage, I’ve had surprisingly good real-world longevity with surveillance/DVR-class SATA drives. They’re designed for 24/7/365 operation in hot enclosures, and in practice many survive 2–5 years in far worse conditions than a datacenter rack.
For sequential backup workloads they’re often the best price/performance option especially in home-branded NAS like qnap, synology or whatever the box is.
For DB or heavy work they will not be suited, for backups, files, movies or whatever alse home use or light SMB, awesome! especially that they have 3 year warranty and those usually last above that.
EDIT:
@rpqu
here, so you don't think that I do not put my money where my moth is:
That is a RAID array of Seagate DVR drives that stores a bunch of our files, scans, stuff we use daily.
Most of the drives are 4+ years old, none had any issue ever, and if they do, I don't care, I will replace them with exactly the same type of surveillance drives, as for what they store and do, they fit the purpose perfectly.
Now, for the storage servers we have, that is something alse, there SAS and HGST/WD ( yes, there we divorced seagate
back in 2025).
Right tool for the right job.
I could attest that since the drive I put into my DVR has exceed its 3Y warranty with > 72TB/year writing. I haven't try using it as desktop or server drive, but my experience with them is so-so during playback or exporting. Perhaps bottleneck with DVR's CPU
PS:
I checked my laptop's HGST and its power on hour have exceed 43 months
SMART data
SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 062 Pre-fail Always - 02 Throughput_Performance 0x0005 100 100 040 Pre-fail Offline - 03 Spin_Up_Time 0x0007 120 120 033 Pre-fail Always - 24 Start_Stop_Count 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - ####5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 005 Pre-fail Always - 07 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000b 100 100 067 Pre-fail Always - 08 Seek_Time_Performance 0x0005 100 100 040 Pre-fail Offline - 09 Power_On_Hours 0x0012 028 028 000 Old_age Always - 3168810 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 060 Pre-fail Always - 012 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - ####191 G-Sense_Error_Rate 0x000a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - ###193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0012 099 099 000 Old_age Always - #####194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0002 139 139 000 Old_age Always - 43 (Min/Max 21/56)196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0022 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0008 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 0199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x000a 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0223 Load_Retry_Count 0x000a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0Okay, I'd give DVR-rated drives a shot for WAL archiving and daily backup.
get any brand, sincerely, I would even go for a 5400 RPM one if used in a nas at home. ( less heat )
also, you will saturate the 1G link with just 1 drive in sequential read and write, so don't pay premium for things that you do not need.
Rather go get something nice for yourself
Always consult with backblaze for battle tested info. HGST wins.
Thanks for your concern and the push. As for network management, I already got it covered with 10G home "core" switch.
And I have planned two holiday trips this year. I should put emphasis that each trip still costs less than an RTX 5090
Tough decision, mate
I have a Toshiba 2TB HDD I bought back in 2016, it's still going strong today.
But all brands are good these days, even Seagate has improved.
For now, it makes sense to go with the cheapest option. Prices will likely come down later
Mine also toshiba 2TB for home is almost 6 years of writing and erasing games on it. Yes i play games from hdd which dont require ssd, and thats a lot of games. On the other hand i have hitachi laptop hdd which i use it on my home server its from 2013-14. That thing cant die. Currently hosting linux mirrors on it. I want to replace it with 2TB version, but hard to find more than 1 TB. Probably should buy external and disassemble it.
I have to disagree
2TB 2.5" HGST will be hard to find. I don't even know what I'm going to use when my current drive finally shows early sign of failing.
I don't think it's going to go down within the next 12 months.
Hmmm ...
You answered your own question.
Besides, is your scenario really like that of backblaze?
In fact, for my backup drives or secondary HDDs I even intentionally get lower RPM (< 6000 RPM) drives and it went very well so far.
You suggest being reasonable? Shocking (here on LET)!!!
You are of course damn right!
I happen to have and use quite a few Toshiba drives (spinning rust) since years, from quite old ones to quite new, 2.5" and 3.5" ones and not a single one has failed so far (which means years in many cases).
As NVMe was mentioned: just stay away from QLC SSDs! If you search, with some luck you might even find MLC SSDs.
As for brands, both SSD and spinning rust, in my experience the ideal choice is a brand that is (a) well established, and (b) in the second row (behind the giants in the 1st row).
Simple reason: those brands do tend to deliver quality (IMO especially japanese ones) and they tend to be cheaper to be competitive.
Best reason to buy Toshiba is for low noise. They still make meaningfully different consumer NAS drives rather than just disabling bits of marginal enterprise drives
If there will be no SSDs and HDDs available, we might have to return to CDs or even floppy disks.
Everything has a price. They're available, just expensive. Perhaps not the exact one you want, since WD sold all its manufacturing capacity to AI.
AI is causing a breakdown of all markets, but as soon as everyone realizes the government just prints money so much it doesn't mean anything any more, 1.00 US$ == 0.00 € and things will be cheap again.
I think Toshiba's a fine brand. Seagate is the bad one, others are good.
I legit looked up what the most data dense BluRay available is the other day...
If someone has a link to reasonably priced Toshiba's, or any or brand, I'd appreciate it.
I will return to floppy, only in 5.25 format.
Finally, I can put those MFM drives I have on E-bay, yeeeeee, the billions I will make...........
Shit, I forgot where I was writing.
I just see no real value in getting an overkill in performance + price tag of that for things that do not need it.
I get the fact that you need a Ryzen and nvme for fast databases, you do not need that CPU for storing stuff, nor for a normal website.
Yet, who am I to counter the wisdom of the mob, yes fellas, you need DDR6 and Ryzen 15 for a WordPress blog.
Sorry @jsg
Imo, I'm having 20 drives, some are 77% health Seagate, some are WD Red NAS, and the rest are Toshiba laptop drives. The Seagate drives degrade its speed overtime, some become 40 MB/s, the WD Red can reach up to 1 Gb/s if configurated right, and the Toshiba are keeping a stable speed at 150 mb/s.
Seagate drives are known to have models/series where performance degrades badly over time (especially when they start reallocating sectors or the internal cache/firmware starts behaving poorly), which is likely why you’re seeing those 40 MB/s drops and yes, it can get even worse. ( wait to see your post at 3 MB/sec _
Also, if you’re using HW RAID: for the love of all things holy, disable disk write cache and let the RAID controller + BBU/cache do its job properly.
If you’re using software RAID (mdadm or ZFS), at the very least try to match drives by RPM and general performance class. Mixing 7200 + 5900/5400 RPM drives will bottleneck the array hard. - MDADM will even de-sync in case of raid 5/6/50/60.
ZFS tolerates mixed disks better than mdadm, but performance becomes inconsistent and rebuild/resilver times get ugly crazy long.
At scale, it's definitely smaller than LET hosts. Does it work like a backblaze? Yes and no. There's a gradient between spinning 24/7 and being stored inside safes (iron mountain is damn expensive afterall)
I would say that my experience with Toshiba brand is a mix. The refrigerator is still running for 20 years, yet the laptop doesn't last 4 years. And because of word of mouth, I just avoid using Toshiba HDD whenever possible.
As for SSD (and other type of flash storage), I only trust samsung ( some SSD/NVME SKUs/series) and sandisk (SD, micro SD card, thumb drive, etc v30 minimum).
Since 2021 or 2022, I had friends whose consumer-grade NVME dying months after being out of warranty (3Y). Yet, my decade old SSD is still working properly.
Noted. > @deafcon said:
Sorry, only unreasonable pricing available. $25/TB pricing is the new low
Gotta show off the YABS.
True, so this is not LET, it is LET-YABS website, ok, noted.
again, for home use nas stuff, just get the boring 5900/5400 dvr drives, again, any brand.
Just make sure you have warranty.
Either-way the will get bashed by shipping more then you will ever wear them out on normal usage