Toshiba AL13SXB600N 600GB SAS 6Gb/s HDD Review

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INTRODUCTION

With 2TB solid state drives already available in the market and 4TB models announced to arrive pretty soon it's clear that although the price/capacity gap with 3.5" mechanical drives is still quite wide (currently 10TB 3.5" drives have already made their debut) the same no longer applies for 2.5" mechanical drives since as we speak the highest capacity model is a 3TB one. All of the above however are for the consumer market so when it comes to enterprise grade products things change quite a bit since SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) models cost a lot more compared to their SATA siblings. Because of that 2.5" enterprise grade mechanical hard drives still have the "edge" over enterprise grade SSDs in terms of price/capacity and thus many professionals and businesses still choose to go with them for their data arrays. Toshiba recently announced their latest AL13SXBxx 15.000 RPM 2.5" SAS hard drive line and not long after being the first ones to test the 12Gb/s SAS model with us we have the 6Gb/s SAS one.



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.



Just like the AL13SXB60EN 12Gb/s SAS drive which we reviewed recently the AL13SXB600N is also a 600GB, 2.5", 15mm thick HDD (also available in 450 and 300GB models) that spins at 15.000 RPM and although it features SAS 6Gb/s connectivity (backwards compatible with 3 and 1.5Gb/s) and only has 64MB of cache it still manages to keep up by producing an equally impressive average latency of just 2.0s. Strangely enough the AL13SXB600N is slightly more power "hungry" compared to the AL13SXB60EN since it consumes up to 9W while in use and up to 5W while in idle mode but it still offers the same excellent MTTF (Mean Time to Fail) of 2.000.000 hours making ideal for use in data centers. So aside 12Gb/s SAS connectivity on paper the AL13SXB600N really has very little else to be jealous of its more expensive sibling the AL13SXB60EN so all that's left is to check and see how well it really does in our tests.