Is 6TB Toshiba I purchased real or fake ?

[Cypherdude]

Tuxan and Cypherdude,

Really appreciate your expert help.

When I posted the thread I had used the HDD to just get the test result & had not written any data on it & so is that the reason Crystal disk not showing any power on hours ?

I just wrote about 1 TB of data & have put the test results here. I don't know what spin up time is & why is it such a huge number when threshold should be only 1.

Please advice because I need 2 more drives like this & if it is safe to order.

I don't understand the logic behind putting such a delicate & expensive hardware in a tinfoil ( Anti static ) & how many hands did it change & hopefully no one had dropped it.

Thank You

It shouldn't matter whether or not you are writing data to the HDD. The HDD should always be keeping SMART stats as long as it is powered and spinning, even if the drive is not mounted by the O/S or the data cable is not attached.

Your drive is keeping stats. Your HDD now has 31 Power-On Hours according to HD Tune Pro. CrystalDiskInfo says 1F which is hexadecimal and is 31 in decimal. You can use the Windows Calculator in "Programmer" mode to translate the numbers or just use an Internet search. I used Startpage Internet search to translate and later tried Windows Calculator. Why CrystalDiskInfo doesn't just use decimal I don't know.

Your Spin Up Time in HD Tune Pro is 11896 which is milliseconds or 11.896 seconds. In CrystalDiskInfo it's 2E78 which is hexadecimal or 11896 decimal. This seems a bit slow but as long as you're satisfied, it's OK. As a comparison, the Spin Up Time for my WD Black 7200 RPM HDD is 4266 milliseconds or 4.3 seconds. It could be Toshiba counts Spin Up Time in a different way.

Your HD Tune Pro 5.60 Error Scan for the entire drive seems to be OK. As long as your drive doesn't make any strange noises and the SMART stats are OK, you should be OK. In order to get any SMART stat reading translated into English in HD Tune Pro 5.60, which I am running right now, you need to click on the stat and read what it means on the bottom of the SMART list under "Description."

For the SMART stats, you have a "Current" number, what I call the Index. The "Threshold" is the lowest acceptable SMART Index you can have without the drive throwing an error. The Index is not the actual Data or Raw Value.

Again, personally I prefer to buy a Retail-Boxed hard drive, preferably in person, because HDD's are so delicate. Unfortunately, it has become the norm to buy HDD's in only anti-static bags. It's up to you what to buy. BTW, there is a controversy today regarding manufacturer warranties. I have seen some hardware news videos saying manufacturers are reneging, or welshing, on their warranties. The FTC has become involved. I am not saying anything about any manufacturer. However, the controversy is out there. Call Toshiba and make sure you are actually covered and for how long. Sometimes you must purchase hardware from an "Authorized" retailer to be covered by a warranty.

 

[Tuxan]

Tuxan and Cypherdude,

Really appreciate your expert help.

When I posted the thread I had used the HDD to just get the test result & had not written any data on it & so is that the reason Crystal disk not showing any power on hours ?

I just wrote about 1 TB of data & have put the test results here. I don't know what spin up time is & why is it such a huge number when threshold should be only 1.

Please advice because I need 2 more drives like this & if it is safe to order.

I don't understand the logic behind putting such a delicate & expensive hardware in a tinfoil ( Anti static ) & how many hands did it change & hopefully no one had dropped it.

Thank You

The drive seems good to me. Spin up. Indicates how long it take to become operational indicating any issue with the motor for the drive/platter. As Cypherdude says the readings are fine for a new drive.

When you order drives for a company they often come in a box or similar foam slotted holder. They are not super tough, but when not running they are quite resistent to shock as the heads are "parked" so won't skate across the surface. This was not always case in very early drives (70s/80s) but standard for both laptop and desktop now. Laptop drives also park if they detect shock while running.

This is likely how they were shipped to your reseller. The thing that kills drives is under-voltage aka brown power in the past a classic was a neighbour using a welder or heavy plant machinery in a factory starting up, the light bulbs dim and the hard drives get damaged. It's not likely to affect you.

 

[Tuxan]

Funny coincidence, today I opened a new, factory shrink wrapped mini-pc and as we had been talking about it, had a look at crystal a few minutes after setup. It started with 94 hours power on time

That could be burn-in testing at the factory but it does make you wonder. If so that's a very good factory test.

 

[nitrene]

I guess I should have framed the question differently. In early 2000, I trusted Seagate because of good reputation at that time & all 4 HDDs crapped out in less than a year even-though I bought them from a reputable source & they did replaced them with new ones but I did lose some data & could not recover them.
Since then I found out that many vendors are selling Refurbished drives as new ones so I started buying systems from Dell with extra HDDs which worked out well.
But this time three 4TBs Toshiba HDDs with my newer workstation became full much earlier than expected & for newer HDDs they are asking 4 times the price in the market.
So I decided to buy from a reputable source outside at the full price that Toshiba is advertising but packing looked suspicious & when I put the serial no on Toshiba website, it says out of warranty although Mfd on this 6TB Is April 2024 & hence that raised the suspicion & decided to ask for help from the experts on this forum.

I have tried to give as much info & photos comparing the Dell Toshiba to market Toshiba.

But before I blame & complain to the vendor, I would appreciate if you guys can use your expertise to figure out if this is a genuine HDD or not because I still need to buy 3 more of these.

Thank You & I apologize if I offended anyone.

I use to store a lot of my media on the old 3 Tb & 4 Tb Seagate drives and they were notorious for high failure rates. I believe they failed like 20 times as often as the HGST which were the best at the time. The Seagate Barracuda 3 Tb were the worst culprits. I probably used about 40 or so of the 3 Tb drives and about 4 of them failed. My HGST drives never failed once (of course I only had 7 of them vs 33 for the Seagates).

In short the best drives have always been the HGST (Hitachi). They were bought by Western Digital but they are still considered the best quality. Toshiba has a good reputation as far as I remember.

Enterprise just refers to high MTBF (mean time before failure) & high DWP (Tb written per time interval). DWP is more relevant to SSDs since the data cells have a finite number to rewrites. For spinning platters they probably don't mean that much.

Looking at the PDF for your drive it is a good drive but remember these enterprise drives use a lot of energy mainly due to power loss protection (PLP) in case it loses power before flushing the cache (very important for database entries like OLTP).

 

[qqq]

Again many Thanks Tuxan and Cypherdude.

I am attaching a side by side comparisons of the Original Dell Toshiba 4.0 TB that came with my Workstation & the New Toshiba 6.0 TB that I purchased locally from a retailer. He did not give me in a box but just the bare HDD in tinfoil and he ordered that from another dealer in another town. So the bare drive changed hands few times with no packaging.

I did not find WD Black locally but Found another Model as attached.

P. S. Just got thru Toshiba support after several tries. Most of the time it just disconnected me.

Lady asked me for serial & told me warranty is good till August 13, 2029 which is more than 5 years from the Mfd date printed on drive 20240403.

But I forgot to ask if I need to register it. Should I & Would they ?

So you guys were right all along & that is the difference between a newbie like me and experts like you guy.

I am very grateful to you guys.

 

[qqq]

I use to store a lot of my media on the old 3 Tb & 4 Tb Seagate drives and they were notorious for high failure rates.

Me too around 2001. All of mine failed within a year.

remember these enterprise drives use a lot of energy mainly due to power loss protection (PLP) in case it loses power

I have Frequent power outages & running two workstations ( 1100 Watts ) with 12 ( 24 inch ) Monitors requires a very costly UPS & Battery. Tried once & it did not workout well.

 

[nitrene]

That is a lot of electricity usage. 12 monitors is probably about 400-500 Watts.

You could probably reduce it by using larger monitors like the 32" or 43" monitors from LG, Samsung or Dell. They don't use much more energy than 30-50 Watts and they usually have more screen room like 3440 x 1440 or even 4K (3840 x 2160). A saw an Acer 49" that was 4K and only used 50 Watts on average. A lot of the LG 43" 4K monitors are very low in power consumption as well. There a lot of the curved 34" monitors I've seen with 3440 x 1440 resolution that use low power as well (these are usually marketed towards gamers).

As for your workstations, you could reduce power by building your own box that uses low power CPUs & GPUs or just use APUs made by AMD or Intel. Xeons & EPYC CPUs use a lot of power like 200-400 Watts but if you don't need that much power you can build a box with low power consumer CPUs like the Intel i9-12900T which only uses 35 watts at rest and maxes out at 110 watts. Its still pretty fast. For drives use SATA SSDs which use like 2-3 watts. Use a motherboard that isn't made for overclocking. A box like this wouldn't use more than 200 watts.

 

[qqq]

nitrene,

Great suggestions. Really appreciate it & will give it a hard look.

Many Thanks