The drive is brand new and has the latest firmware installed. Let’s start our tests. The AJA System Test gives a rough idea of the drive's performance. We got around 217MB/sec reading/writing speed, nice results here.

The ATTO Disk benchmark gives us more details:

Above 8K files we got around 255mb/sec reading and 245mb/sec writing speeds. The same performance also came from the ATTO Disk Benchmark v4.00.

Passing to the CrystalDiskMark software we got results from 3.01, 6.02, 7 and the latest 8.01 versions. The performance in all cases is similar for the sequential reading/writing speed.

With HDTach RW we did saw a drop at the writing speed, linear after 600GB, while reading seems to drop after 1.0TB from 180MB/sec to 100MB/sec.

Via Hard Disk Sentinel 6.0 Pro, we monitored the drive's internal temperatures and we got from 30~40 Celcius, which should be OK for most users.

- Conclusion

The Toshiba P300 Desktop HDD series already offered several capacities and rotating speeds. Toshiba recently introduced a newer proposal for the 2TB market with the HDWD320UZSVA model that has 7200rpm rotating speeds, SMR recording technology and 256GB of cache. The overall result sounds good to us and from the test results we are satisfied, especially when reading/writing big size files, both reading and writing seems to be around 220-230Mb/sec, which is very good to have. The measured temperatures are also very good <40 Celsius and as for sound noise, we are happy to report that the drive didn't introduced loud noise during our tests. As happens with all traditional mechanical HDDs, loads with very small files will make the HDD perform much worse, so in that case an SSD would be a better solution.

So all is good with the PC300? We could say yes, even we feel that users should had at least 3 years of warranty for the HDWD320UZSVA HDD model. Again if the price is OK we have no problems suggesting this desktop HDD for all users who wish to expand their storage needs.