TOSHIBAX300 4TB Performance & Gaming 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive - CMR SATA 6.0 GB/s 7200 RPM 128 MB Cache - HDWE140XZSTA

the drives i bought was the 4 terabyte toshiba x300 , the hard drives are great i have several of these same drives , they are perfect size , performance vs price , 7200 rpm large sizei have 2 ps4s ( very first model and second model ps4s og ps4s ) that have 6 terabytes tochiba x300 in both of them with these same drives INTERNAL( links to all products i used on amazon for my ps4s at the bottom of review )you get esata to sata cable and plug in the sata part of the cable into the internal ps4 portroute the cableout the front of the hard drive cage over the cage route the cable to the back of the ps4 and out the coner vent ,use electric tape and tape the cable down firmly , i used alotta tape here and it came out perfect nice and tight, cut the corner and second vent next to it to create one big vent and route the cable out that vent , then put hard drive cover on , the hardest part of this , is getting the sata cable onto the sata port of the ps4 , my very first time on both my ps4s i got it first time with needle nose pliersmine has been perfect ever since , however my son at 12 years old was not as careful and yanked his sata cable out somehow , upon trying to put sata cable back on i could not and wound up cutting his cage just so i could get the cable on wich i did and after that its worked fine , this mod to the ps4 works perfect but use common sense and do not yank the sata cable on the back , really i have no clue how he even did that as i had it done perfect so it could not movenow you have a ps4 with a sata cable coming out the back , now go on amazon and buy the rosewill external hard drive housing with esata port , it also has a fan on top a circle vent and on the front has blue led light , like the whole front of this housing lights up blue ( looks really good ontop the ps4 ) its always on amazon i think i paid 30 bucks for it search rosewill external hard drive housing esata and you will find ittake your x300 Toshiba hard drive and put it inside the housing , then plug esata part of the sata to esata cable into the back of the external housing ,sit the external housing on top of your ps4 on the side that the hard drive bay is ,now you have a ps4 with 6 terabytes of internal storagei never use rest mode , im sure you can but i never use it so i do not even know if it worksevery time you shut off your psd4 you must shut off your hard drive ( ON OFF WITH ON THE EXTERNAL HOUSING power switch )if you leave the hard drive external housing on after you shut off your ps4 when you come back if you turn on your ps4 it will show black screen , this is because you left the hard drive on with no source and the hard drive went into hibernation stateso to fix this plug in controller turn off ps4 , or just hit the power button and turn off ps4 , then turn on the hard drive then turn on ps4every time you must turn hard drive on first then ps4 , after a few times of getting a black screen that says ps4 can not detect hard drive and shutting off your ps4 then turning on the hard drive then turning on the ps4 and seeing all is good , after a few times of this you get used to it and it is a none issuei did this before the external update that gave everyone the ability to use external hard drives on ps4 , but i still think this uis the best way to go because now you can also get external storage and eventually have way over 6 terabytes and also several drives all because you got a massive internal storagethis drive i am buying i am buying three 4 terabyte x300 Toshiba for 3 different gaming computers as now we went to PC and will in the future only use our ps4s for Sony exclusives ( they are still tho both filled with 6 terabytes of games on both of them from before we went to PC gaming )the benefit to this is massive storage , i can not explain how awesome it is to turn on your ps4 and have 6 terabytes of games ready to play , i am in the process of doing the same but on a much larger scale to all three of my family's gaming computers with 20 terabytes of games on each PC , and i will be doing it all with these Toshiba x300 drives because the cost per performance and size is perfectthese drives are perfect i gave them 5 stars because the drives are perfect price for what your getting and they are 7200 rpm , these are really all you need for gaming on PC or consolethese drives where not shipped very well tho , i did not take a star off because they are great drives and its not Toshiba fault , its i think dells fault , as amazon says on the ship order tab that they where shipped by dell even tho i bought them from amazon( newegg sells these same drives when i bought them from newegg in the past as i have many of these same drives they where very well packaged , i purchased here on amazon because i was already buying other things this time )they where not damaged in any way , but they where packed with no bubble anything no protection in shipping just three hard drives thrown into a boxthey could of easily bounced around and got damaged , i have worked warehouses my whole life and not one place i have ever worked at would accept that type of job performance , whoever packages and picked my order obviously did not care weather the product reached its destination safelyluckily they did reach me safely undamaged , the outside box was undamaged and the contents inside the three hard drives where undamaged , but it was packages with no regard for customers merchandise , they basically put 6 inches tall of product into a 10 inch tall box with nothing to pad it nothing to make sure it stays safe during shipping , whoever picked my order did not carei have read comments on newegg and here on amazon that Toshiba warranty , like if the drive messes up and you need a replacement , they give you a choice of gift card ( value you paid i am assuming ) or replacement and usually they do not have a replacement to give you so they give you gift card , i have not had to go thru this yet as all my drives are in perfect working order , but i am mentioning it because it sounds like a huge hassle to deal with as others have said , i read a comment where the guy did not get reimbursed till like 6 weeks later , that would irritate me bad , luckily i have not had to deal with that , out of 6 drives all are working fine , i still have 2 i have not installed yet , imma install them tomorrow on my PC and my wife's PCthis the housing i used on both ps4s https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005KGNXTE/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o04_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1then just get a sata to esata cable https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002P6W8E8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o08_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1and biggest size x300 7200 rpm Toshiba drive you can afford i got the 6 terabyte for both ps4s https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013JPKUU2/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

I am a Mac user, so what I'm about to say probably does not apply to a PC. I just bought a new 2017 iMac and it is loaded with the fastest 4.2 GHz i7 quad-core processor, a 3TB Fusion drive, and 64GB of RAM, running Sierra. Speed should not be an issue. I bought a pair of these drives to store some files that I prefer to keep in encrypted .DMG containers. Disk Utility makes it easy to create such containers. When you do the math, you realize that even when writing at USB3 speeds, about 100 MB/sec, it will take about 24 hours to fill up an entire 8TB X300 drive with this encrypted container. After the first drive was written to, I found something that did not seem right: when you enter the password and open the container, all writes to it are dog slow, as in 5-10 MB/sec. That's not right.At first I attributed the problem to the drive, so I opened the second X300 drive and repeated the operation, but found the same slow write speed to the opened container. One drive bad, okay. Two drives bad? No. Using Disk Utility's First Aid showed no signs of issues with the drive. Any other writes to the drive to non-encrypted folders, or a non-encrypted container, and the speeds are normal. Reads from either encrypted or non-encrypted folders/containers are also normal-fast.Some internet research revealed that this problem has been going on for many years and several releases of OSX. It would appear that the slow write speeds to an encrypted container are not a function of any hard drive, but a bug inside Mac OSX. The same internet research found neither a solution nor a workaround. I worked at it and found that there IS a workaround, although it's not fast or easy to do. What you do is find yourself an old Mac that runs Snow Leopard (10.6.8). I have an old iMac that fits the bill, but unfortunately, if it runs Snow Leopard, it means that its ports are limited to either USB2 or Firewire800 (FW800). Writing to these big-capacity drives when your speed is limited to 20-40 MB/sec is going to be SLOW. I was able to put the drives in a FW800 enclosure to get a faster speed than USB2.You now use Disk Utility in the Snow Leopard-based Mac and create the encrypted container on the X300 drive using it. It took about 2.6 days to complete. When complete, you then move the drive over to your newer, fast Mac and connect it up through USB3. When you open the encrypted container, created in Snow Leopard, mount it on the Sierra-based Mac desktop, you find that write speeds are finally what you expect, about 100 MB/sec. I think I'm the first guy to find a viable workaround for this issue. It verifies that the issue is a bug buried in later versions of OSX, which according to some people goes back all the way to Lion (10.7). It's an Apple bug. The observed slow write speeds to the encrypted X300 drive is NOT a problem with the hard drive.Additionally, once you are running on the new fast Mac, you can copy this encrypted container to any other drive (the second X300 drive that I bought), and when you open it, the write speeds are again fast as they should be. In other words, it is just the CREATION of the encrypted container that is the bug in Apple's later Disk Utility code. Formatting, reading, and copying are just fine. How you manage to slap Apple's face to get them to fix it, I don't know.Sorry for the long story, but the slow write speeds to the encrypted container would have been a deal breaker for me. I would have wrapped up the drives and sent them back, blaming the hard drive for what turned out to be a Mac OSX bug. I have found that these drives perform as well as you would expect them to with no slowness or other oddness that I first attributed to the possibility that these drives might use SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) that is notorious for slow writing speeds. Toshiba won't tell anyone what technology is inside their drives, but industry insiders swear it is not SMR. Reads and writes now operate reasonably fast on USB3 for my needs, regardless of whether there is encryption involved or not. You just have to be careful not to use any OSX version of 10.7 or higher to create an encrypted container.

I have had good luck with Toshiba P300 drives in the past, so when I needed a new parity disk for my unraid server, I thought I'd step up the the 6TB X300. I ordered and then read the reviews, which made me start to regret my possibly hasty order. However, I got the drive and installed it. In unraid, there is a "pre-clear" procedure which basically works the disk really hard, writing to every single sector of the disk. I let this run several cycles over a couple of days and I never ran into a single error. Not only that, but this disk is very quiet. I have since assigned it as the parity drive which writes to the disk and works it very hard for many, many hours while it syncs. I have then replaced one of the array drives, which pulls huge amounts of data from the parity drive for hours and hours.Maybe I've been really lucky, or maybe people are just more likely to write a review when something goes bad - don't know. The only thing I see different about this disk an my other disks is that it runs a few degrees hotter when it's busy, but I guess it's a higher performing drive, so will generate a bit of extra heat.What I would say, is that this disk should be quiet as a mouse. If you buy one and it's immediately loud, send it back for RMA. The common thread here among people reporting failures seems to be that this drive is very loud when they get it. From my experience, I think this is a pre-failure warning that you shouldn't ignore.If anything goes wrong in the coming months, I will be sure to update this review.