Toshiba DT01ACA200 Review

Considering a few hundred megabytes to gigabytes of storage space that the latest operating systems, software and games take up, at least a 1TB hard drive is needed to store everything without running into low disk space popups. By everything, we mean the data that you create—your photos, media library, downloaded data, and so on. If you’re an avid gamer or an entertainment buff, it wouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks to fill a terabyte hard drive to its brim. Then, you have to think which software/game to uninstall, what to delete or transfer to an external storage device to gain free space. At that time, you wish you had a large capacity hard drive to satiate your storage needs. Although it would solve your problem for just the next few months down the line, it would be a big relief. If you’re considering a large capacity hard drive, the Toshiba DT01ACA200 might interest you—here’s what it packs within!

A high capacity hard drive with the price-per-GB ratio of Rs 3

Features

The latest development in the hard drive technology is the increase in the areal density. The older hard drives used two platters for 1TB or three to four platters for 2TB of storage space. With the bump in areal density, it’s now possible to offer a terabyte of storage on a single platter, or 3TB on the number of platters that was formerly needed for 2TB. This reduction in the number of platters lowers the cost of production, and a higher platter density translates to faster seek time, and in turn, speedier read and write operations. 

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The Toshiba DT01ACA200 is the 2TB variant from the DT01ACA series that features 1TB-per-platter technology. Other variants use a single or a 3-platter design to offer 500GB, 1TB or 3TB of storage. All the models from the series feature a 7200 rpm spindle and SATA 6Gb/s interface. The only big difference is in the size of the buffer. The 500GB and 1TB drives feature a 32MB buffer while the 2TB and 3TB drives are equipped with a 64MB buffer. Now let’s see how well the tech specs translate into real world performance.

Test rig

Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K

Motherboard: ECS Z77H2-A2X

RAM: 2x4GB G.Skill RipJawsX DDR3-1866

Graphics card: AMD Radeon HD 6870

SSD: Plextor PX-256M2S

Power supply: Cooler Master Silent Pro 800W

OS: Windows 7 Ultimate, 64-bit

Performance

We ran a battery of tests to assess the transfer speed of this drive. The first test was IOMeter, which is most challenging for all kinds of storage devices. The random read and write speed with 4K chunks of data was 0.69MB/s—a tad faster than the Seagate Barracuda XT and a lot faster than the WD Green. The sequential read and write speed was 133MB/s and the random speed was 124.5MB/s (using 512MB chunk of data).This time, with a larger chunk of data, the speed was at par with the 2TB Barracuda XT. CrystalDiskMark and SiSoft Sandra logged slightly higher speeds in sequential tests—145MB/s read and 141MB/s write. However, the random read and write speed logged by SiSoft Sandra was quite low at 77MB/s and 81MB/s respectively.

CrystalDiskMark

SiSoft Sandra - File System test

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Verdict and Price in India

The overall performance of this drive is excellent and is comparable to the 2TB variant of the Barracuda XT that’s more expensive. The current average price for a 500GB and 1TB hard drive is Rs 4,700 and Rs 5,500 respectively. The Toshiba DT01ACA200 is priced at Rs 6,000 (excluding taxes), which makes it a great bang for your buck. If you’ve already planned to go in for a 1TB hard drive to build/upgrade your PC, buying this drive for the difference of a few hundred rupees more would be a wiser decision.