Toshiba AL13SXB60EN 600GB SAS 12Gb/s HDD Review

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INTRODUCTION

Most people i know think that enthusiasts and serious gamers are the ones who always choose the fastest hardware components money can buy for their own systems but that's really far from the truth at least in regard to storage media. In that area for most consumers (enthusiasts and serious gamers included) even a regular SSD is good enough to do the job but for professionals and enterprise users alike there are more important things to take into account other than performance with endurance and the typical price/capacity ratio leading the list. There are of course several enterprise-grade SSD models in the market as we speak but unfortunately to date they haven't been able to catch up with mechanical HDD models in terms of price (that may change in 2016 however) and in some cases even endurance. Toshiba has released several enterprise-grade HDD lines over the past 3 years or so and they continue to do so this time with the brand new AL13SXB60EN (and to date we're the first to take a look).



Toshiba Europe Storage Products Division (SPD) has remained at the forefront of the storage industry for over 40 years and is the world's only storage supplier that owns design, development, manufacturing, sales and other infrastructure functions spanning the enterprise, mobile and retail environments for both HDD and SSD products. Customers are original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), system integrators and distributors within the EMEA region. As a leading provider of integrated storage solutions and as the principal inventor of NAND flash storage, Toshiba sets many of today’s industry standards for storage technology. Throughout its history, Toshiba SPD has revolutionized the design and development of storage devices and its drives can be found inside the world's leading GPS navigation systems, consumer electronics, computers and enterprise solutions. In addition, Toshiba Storage Products Division offers an extensive range of advanced technology drives such as high durability 24/7, extended temperature and SSDs for the consumer, industrial, enterprise and automotive sector.



The AL13SXB60EN may just offer 600GB of storage capacity (also available in 450/300GB) but it's probably one of the fastest 2.5-inch (15mm thick) enterprise-grade HDDs currently in the market since thanks to its SAS 12Gb/s connectivity (backwards compatible with 6, 3 and 1.5Gb/s), rotational speed of 15000 RPM and 128MB of cache it sports an average latency of just 2.0s. Ontop of that add its low power consumption of 8.7W even under load (4.5W in idle), Toshiba's persistent write cache technology (improves data integrity and performance) and an excellent MTTF (Mean Time To Fail) of 2.000.000 hours and you've got yourself a powerful tool for mission critical IT operations. To some people jumping from SAS 6Gb/s to SAS 12Gb/s may seem too much for mechanical drives but aside the fact that these drives are backwards compatible with previous SAS host controllers (thus you may still use them without a 12Gb/s card) manufacturers may also start offering SAS SSHD enterprise-grade drives so this was the obvious path for them.