10x Toshiba MG03ACA300 3TB Enterprise SATA $950 BO'd $800

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chinesestunna

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Jan 23, 2015
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Looks like this line of drives was intro'd early 2013 so presumably at least 3 years warranty left on them.
According to seller warranty through 2018, at least it says that on listing, pretty good deal for bulk number of these drives. Wish these were the 5900RPM ABA model and I'd be all over it
 

chinesestunna

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Jan 23, 2015
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whoa, these are probably better than the consumer WD 3TB red drives at 169 a piece (WD Red Pro 3 TB NAS Hard Drive WD3001FFSX up to 16 bay: 3.5-inch SATA 6, 64MB Cache - Newegg.com I wonder if they're quiet though. I threw my WD reds on top of some bubble wrap and I can't hear them.
I honestly don't get allure of WD Reds, it seems to me they just crippled blue/green series via firmware so they can upsell us on the Reds. I've used Hitachis for last 10x2TB array and now Toshiba for 10x3TB array and they seem to work fine without fancy "RAID" firmware
 

tby

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Aug 22, 2013
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seems to me they just crippled blue/green series via firmware so they can upsell us on the Reds
Well, yeah. Used to be you could run WDTLER.exe and set whatever timeouts you wanted but that was cutting into sales of their otherwise undifferentiated Enterprise SATA drives. Now you've gotta pay more if you want a drive that doesn't constantly park its heads. More for TLER. More for 7,200RPM. If my count is right there are 11 different product lines for SATA LFF sub-10K RPM drives on WD's site. WTF?
 

gigatexal

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I think I got a really good deal on two WD Reds which is why I got them. I've since moved to SSD storage but am still waiting for prices/GB to fall even more and enterprise features to become even more mainstream.

I guess the point I was trying to make was with this posting one could possibly get enterprise level disks at consumer prices.
 

chinesestunna

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Jan 23, 2015
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Well, yeah. Used to be you could run WDTLER.exe and set whatever timeouts you wanted but that was cutting into sales of their otherwise undifferentiated Enterprise SATA drives. Now you've gotta pay more if you want a drive that doesn't constantly park its heads. More for TLER. More for 7,200RPM. If my count is right there are 11 different product lines for SATA LFF sub-10K RPM drives on WD's site. WTF?
Haha, soon they'll run out of colors, off top of my head we have Black, Blue, Purple, Green, Red...
Next we can add Yellow, Orange, White, then we're out of primary/secondary colors and WD market would have to get creative
 

tby

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Aug 22, 2013
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My order arrived Friday in a proper shipping box. No DOAs, all have mfr dates in August/September 2013. I've had them running 60-ish hours now and smartctl shows Power_On_Hours of 113-154 so I guess someone bench tested them at some point.
 

PithyChats

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Feb 3, 2015
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My order arrived Friday in a proper shipping box. No DOAs, all have mfr dates in August/September 2013. I've had them running 60-ish hours now and smartctl shows Power_On_Hours of 113-154 so I guess someone bench tested them at some point.
That is pretty solid, though the ad did say new no? Still I guess you could argue less than 1 week was just testing.
 

Boddy

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Oct 25, 2014
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Is tempting. Are these drives any good/durable units? Or is Enterprise just a moniker? Or is SAS the way to go for durability in HDD, but way more expensive?
 

PithyChats

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Feb 3, 2015
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Is tempting. Are these drives any good/durable units? Or is Enterprise just a moniker? Or is SAS the way to go for durability in HDD, but way more expensive?

Here are the important stats:

MTTF - 1.2 Million hours with 24/7 duty cycle
Non recoverable error rate < 1 in 10^15
Shock 70G operating, 300G non-operating (2ms)
Load\Unload - 600,000
Operating temperature - 5C-60C

These compare favorably to say the WD RE4 (in all cases at least as good). Now these are just manufacturers specs, but at least on paper, yes these are good/durable units.
For further comparison, Toshiba's own SAS drives have all the same stats except a MTTF of 1.4 millions hours for 3.5" 7.2K drives. If you go to 10K or even 15K drives, the Non recoverable error rate is an order or magnitude better, < 1 in 10^16, but these drives are a very different price point, and the largest is 1.2TB.

You can verify the numbers yourself here:
Toshiba MG03ACA300 spec sheet: http://www.rm.com/_rmvirtual/media/downloads/1yy312_1yy647_1yy648_manual.pdf
WD RE4: http://www.wdc.com/wdproducts/library/SpecSheet/ENG/2879-771444.pdf
Toshiba Enterprise drives: Enterprise HDD | Storage Products | TOSHIBA Semiconductor & Storage Products Company | Americas
 
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F1ydave

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I've been picking up WD 2TB RE4 for $50 or less for months. Still trying to fill my 20 bay. :p
 

Boddy

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Oct 25, 2014
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What's up with so many of these MG03ACA300 3TB Enterprise Drives appearing online. Especially here in Australia. One seller has 10 lots of 20 drives ans sold 40 individual units. Usually posted as 'new'. I'm wondering if these are refurbished units, as prices are low for 3TB units. What do you think? Cheers
 

Boddy

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Mine came in packaging that wasn't what I'm used to with new ODM drives, and smartctl reported a trivial number of running hours, but they cost around the going rate of a used and out-of-warranty wd30efrx and these have lots of warranty left. If they're still going for this price next month I will buy another batch of 10.
Many thanks tby for your feedback. Much appreciated
 

Angus

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Mar 3, 2015
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I tried a BO and best he would do was 900 so I passed...
Might still not be a bad deal.. but shipping to Canada isn't to cheap and our dollar sucks right now
 
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JayG30

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Thoughts on performance of the Toshiba vs.
3TB Seagate ES.2 SAS
3TB HGST 7300k SAS or on Ebay

SAS is obviously going to be an advantage to the above disks (if you need dual port SAS) vs the Toshiba. The HGST 7300k and Seagate ES.2 are older drivers (I think they are from 2011 and the Toshiba is from 2013), but it looks like from reviews the performance between all 3 are similar. The HGST also specs MTTF at 2M hours, which seems to be the highest (not sure how much that is worth).

Looks like the seller for the Toshiba is looking for $90/disk. The SAS ES.2 and SAS 7300k probably won't sell below $150 new on ebay.
 
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