Which NAS HDD good for gaming? Whether you’re hosting a cloud, sharing files between workgroups or powering a high-traffic network, the NAS hard drive delivers advanced reliability supporting workloads of up to 180 TB per year(6) and MTTF of up to 1.2 million hours(7) to help keep your NAS system running 24/7. Which is worth buying – Toshiba N300 vs Seagate IronWolf?
Pros & Cons – Toshiba N300 vs Seagate IronWolf
Toshiba N300
Pros
- Great NAS features
- Reliable
- Very good speeds
- High capacity
- Reasonable price
Cons
- Overkill for non-NAS devices
- Not the fastest NAS drive
Seagate IronWolf
Pros
- High capacity Great speeds Excels in RAID arrays NAS-specific features
Cons
- Expensive Wasted as a standard hard drive Lower capacities are slower
Specs – Toshiba N300 vs Seagate IronWolf
Toshiba N300
- Form factor: 3.5-inch
- Interface: SATA 6.0 Gbit/s
- Capacities: 4TB, 6TB, 8TB
- Rotational speed: 7200 rpm
- Buffer size: 128MB
- Dimensions: 147 (L) x 101.85 (W) x 26.1 (H) mm
- Weight: 770 g max.
- Box content: 3.5-inch internal hard drive – N300 High-Reliability HardDrive
- Supported drive bays: up to 8
- RAID support
- Workloads: 180TB/year
Seagate IronWolf
- Drive Bays Supported Up to 24-bay
- Recording Technology CMR
- Workload Rate Limit (TB/yr) 300
- Rotational Vibration (RV) Sensors Yes
- Hot-Plug Support2 Yes
- Cache (MB) 256
- Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF, hours) 1.2M
- Reliability Rating @ Full 24×7 Operation (AFR) 0.73%
- Non-recoverable Read Errors per Bits Read, Max 1 per 10E15
- Power-On Hours (per year) 8760
- Sector Size (Bytes per Logical Sector) 512E
- Rescue Services3 Yes
- Limited Warranty (years) 5
- Spindle Speed (RPM) 7200
- Interface Access Speed (Gb/s) 6.0, 3.0, 1.5
- Max Sustained Transfer Rate OD (MB/s) 260
- Average Latency (ms) 4.16
- Rotational Vibration @10-1500Hz (rad/s2) 12.5
- Startup Current, Typical (12V, A) 2.0
- Idle Power, Average (W) 5.2
- Average Operating Power (W) 8.0
- Standby Mode (W) 1.25
- Sleep Mode (W) 1.0
- Power Supply Requirements +12V and +5V
- Operating Temperature (reported, °C)4 5 to 65
- Non-operating Temperature (ambient, min °C) -40 to 70
- Non-operating Vibration 10Hz to 500Hz (Grms) 2.27
- Operating Shock 2 ms (Read/Write) (G) 50
- Non-operating Shock 1 ms and 2 ms (G) 200
- Idle Acoustics (typical, bels) 2.8
- Seek Acoustics (typical, bels) 3.2
- Height (mm/in, max) 26.11/1.028
- Width (mm/in, max) 101.85/4.01
- Depth (mm/in, max) 146.99/5.787
- Weight (g/lb, typical) 670/1.477
Price – Toshiba N300 vs Seagate IronWolf comparison
The Toshiba N300 series comes in three high capacities: 4TB (the one we’ve reviewed here), 6TB and 8TB. The 4TB version costs £120 (around $160, AU$200), while the 6TB version will set you back £200 (around $260, AU$350), and the 8TB version costs £250 (around $320, AU$440).
If 10TB still feels like too much space, you can also get the IronWolf hard drives in 1TB, 2TB, 3TB, 4TB, 6TB and 8TB capacities as well. The 10TB version will set you back £314 ($264, AU$469). And, if 10TB isn’t enough, Seagate is now also offering a 12TB drive.
Who is this for – Toshiba N300 vs Seagate IronWolf
One of the easiest ways to narrow down the search for a suitable hard drive is to look at the target market of each family. The table below lists the suggested target market for each hard drive family we are considering today.
| Drive Family | Target Markets |
| Seagate BarraCuda Pro | Desktops and All-in-Ones Home Servers Creative Professionals Workstations Entry-Level Direct-Attached-Storage (DAS) Units |
| Seagate IronWolf NAS | NAS Units up to 8 bays (Home, SOHO, and Small Business) |
| Seagate IronWolf Pro NAS | NAS Units up to 24 bays (Creative Pros, SOHO, and Small to Medium Enterprises) |
| Seagate Exos Enterprise | Datacenter and Bulk Cloud Storage |
| Toshiba N300 | NAS Units up to 8 bays |
| Toshiba X300 | Professional Desktops, Home Media or Gaming PCs |
| WD Gold | Datacenter and Bulk Cloud Storage |
| WD Red | NAS Units up to 8 bays, Read-Intensive and Archival Workloads |
| WD Red Plus | NAS Units up to 8 bays |
| WD Red Pro | NAS Units up to 24 bays |
After filtering out models that don’t apply to your use-case (as an example, for usage in a 4-bay NAS enclosure, one could rule out the Toshiba X300 straight away), we can then take a look at how the specifications of various drive families compare.
Compare Toshiba N300 vs Seagate IronWolf
| Toshiba N300 12TB NAS 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive | Seagate IronWolf 12TB NAS Internal Hard Drive HDD | |
|---|---|---|
| Cache Memory Installed Size | 256.00 | 256 |
| Digital Storage Capacity | 12 TB | 12 TB |
| Hard Disk Rotational Speed | 7200 rpm | 7200 rpm |
| Hard Disk Size | 12 TB | 12 TB |
| Hard Disk Form Factor | 3.50 inches | 3.50 inches |
| Hardware Interface | SATA 6.0 Gb/s | SATA 6.0 Gb/s |
| Item Dimensions | 5.79 x 4 x 1.03 inches | 5.79 x 4.01 x 1.03 inches |
| Item Weight | 1.70 lbs | 1.55 lbs |
| Size | 12 TB | 12TB |
What is the key difference – Toshiba N300 vs Seagate IronWolf?
Design
Toshiba N300 has a standard 3.5-inch design which means it can easily be installed in PCs, servers and NAS devices, but not laptops. The high capacities are welcome, and its fast RPM means it delivers very good data transfer speeds.
The IronWolf is an excellent hard drive that offers fast and dependable storage. The fact that its helium design means you can get huge amounts of capacity into a regular 3.5-inch hard drive is incredibly impressive, and means even if you use a number of these drives in a RAID array, you’ve still got plenty of storage space to play with.
Rotational speed
Despite throttling the speeds when temperatures get too hot, Toshiba is still bullish about the transfer rates the N300 can achieve, claiming speeds of 200MB/s. This is achieved thanks to a 128MB buffer, and a rotational speed of 7,200 RPM, which is faster than the speeds of many NAS-orientated hard drives, such as the WD Red, which spins at only 5,400 RPM.
The Seagate IronWolf has sequential read speeds of 250.2 MB/s and write speeds of 229.2 MB/s, which are very impressive, considering this is a 7200RPM hard drive, and handily beats the Seagate Enterprise Capacity 3.5 HDD V.4 6TB Hard Disk, which reached 213MB/s read and 212MB/s write speeds in the same test.
Read & write speed
With the Toshiba N300 4TB hard drive reaching sequential read speeds of 210MB/s, and write speeds of 209.2MB/s in the CrystalDiskMark benchmark test.
Meanwhile the IronWolf 10TB, another NAS-orientated hard drive, scored 250.2MB/s read and 229.2MB/s write, offering both faster speeds and larger capacities.
In comparison, the WD Rd 8TB scored read speeds of 185MB/s and write speeds of 185.4MB/s. That’s quite a difference, and mainly down to the faster spin speeds of the Toshiba N300.
Alternate of Compare Toshiba N300 vs Seagate IronWolf
WD Red Pro WD6003FFBX 6TB
SPECIFICATIONS
- Interface: SATA 6Gbps
- Capacity: 2TB – 12TB
- Cache: 256MBRPM: 7200
Pros
+Great performance
+Reliable
Cons
-10TB drive is quite loud
WD’s Red Pro continues the company’s mantra of offering affordable and reliable storage that reduces total cost of ownership. It packs 3D Active Balance Plugs tech, which is said to significantly improve the over drive performance and reliability. That’s in addition to NASware tech, which is designed to improve reliability and system performance, reduce downtime and simplify the integration process while offering robust data protection.
WD Gold 4TB Enterprise Class Hard Disk Drive
SPECIFICATIONS
- Interface: SATA 6Gbps
- Capacity: 4TB – 12TB
- Cache: 128MBRPM: 7200
Pros
+Excellent performance
+Smartly priced
Cons
-Support is not as robust as rivals’
If your business has a requirement to storage large files (or just lots of them), WD’s Gold series stretches all the way to a massive 12TB in size. And they boast some interesting traits: not least being filled with helium to protect tiny components inside that can be come damaged by atmospheric turbulence. Its on par with any of Seagate’s 12TB offerings when it comes to read and write performance and offers many of its rival drives’ features at no extra cost.
Western Digital Red NAS Hard Disk Drive
SPECIFICATIONS
- Interface: SATA 6Gbps
- Capacity: 1TB – 12TB
- Cache: 64BRPM: 5400
Pros
+Large capacity hard drive
+Performs better than rival 4TB models
Cons
-Average multi-drive small block sequential transfer speeds
It was only a few years ago that Western Digital’s 6TB NAS was the pack leader, offering more storage space than you could get from competing models. While that’s no longer the case, it’s still a unit with capacious storage space. Designed for both business and consumers, it offers fast performance especially in multi-drive environments where it boasts strong large-block sequential read and write speeds.
Editor’s recommendations
- Samsung 870 QVO SATA III 2.5 SSD 4TB (MZ-77Q4T0B) review – is it good for gaming?
- SanDisk 128GB Extreme Pro (525MB/s) CFast 2.0 memory card review
- Compare WD Red Plus vs Red Pro – when you should you it?
- Sabrent Rocket XTRM-Q portable TB3 SSD 8TB review
- WD 16TB Elements desktop hard drive review – can you use on Mac?
