TOSHIBA MG09ACA18TE 18 TB Hard Drive 3.5 Internal

The drives are best value for price (even still as of writing date) on Amazon. I Installed two x 18TB drives into my NAS which was excellent for space but did come at an noticeable noise level increase. At first I was concerned that the noises the drives made meant some fault but I have ran 2 full scans on the drives and have found no errors. So far everything working good. The noises likely come from the drives themselves and the way the “Flux Control Microwave-assisted Magnetic Recording” tech works.

I’m new to Toshiba drives (have lots of Seagate and WD), but these drives lack a SMART conveyance test, which is the first thing I run when I get new drives to check for shipping damage. Instead, I ran the long test on them. Here’s another difference. On Seagate/WD, while a long test is running, there’s an entry in the test results stating that a test is ongoing, and what % is left. And if a drive loses power, when it gets power again, it’ll resume the test where it left off. On these drives, there’s no entry in the test results until the test completes, and if the drive loses power, it’ll forget it was testing.

Other than those quirks, SMART output shows that these drives are brand new with 0 hours and the long tests completed on them without issue. FYI, the polling time recommended for the long test results was 15xx minutes (25-26 hours), but the tests actually finished in about 22 hours.

The disk I got delivers was reasonably packed. I checked the warranty on Toshiba’s website and the drive seems to have more than 4.5 years warranty left. The drive appears to be produced in October and that is when the warranty appears to be starting. I ordered late in December and received it beginning of January. According to smart data, the disk I received is completely new. Smart data tells that me starting it was the very first start cycle and the time I have it running also started from zero. This means I got a new unused drive with original warranty from the manufacturer. Extensive self test is still running, but so far it looks good. I will change my review if something comes up.

NOTE: I’ve seen many people complain about drives because they’re “fake” and only have 2048 GB. The drive is not fake. 2048GB is a limitation of the old MBR partition format, and if you initialize/format the drive with MBR you will see a 2TB partition! All you need to do to fix this is right click on the drive number in Windows Disk Management (get there from the start menu via Computer Management or “Create and format hard disk partitions”), click “Convert to GTP”, and reformat the drive.

I needed to replace several 6-year-old 6TB drives, and these were the natural choice. FC-MAMR is, of course, new tech, but I am expecting these to be reliable: a media that requires a stronger magnetic recording field means more energy is required to flip individual magnetic bits, so they should be less likely to flip on their own.

Otherwise, the drives run exactly like you’d expect any other drive to run: plug it in and go. They aren’t any noisier than any of my other drives and I have been transferring data to them non-stop since installation and haven’t encountered any problems or unexpected behavior.

Great job, Toshiba!

Packaging did not appear to manufacturer packaging, and Hard disk was purchased as NEW but reported as having 186 usage hours, and 233 powered on hours. This is clearly a used drive resold at NEW prices, hoping to be sold to someone who doesn’t know how to check this.

Prodotto eccellente, oltre 16 tera di spazio disponibile, veloce e silenzioso. Ho letto commenti denigratori che parlano di un hd rumoroso: io lo uso per elaborazione video, non lavora di notte nella mia camera da letto ma, al momento, non ho notato rumore in scrttura. Ci ho versato mezzo tera di dati in 10 minuti mentre scrivevo un difficile elaborato scientifico e non mi sono nemmeno accorto stesse scrivendo.