Toshiba is one of the best and well known storage companies. Recently Toshiba introduced a new model or we could say, revision for their PC300 series, a product that introduced back from 2017. While the PC300 series were a successful model, Toshiba boosted up reading/writing speeds and gave us a new 2TB model with improved rotating speed, 7200rpm and higher internal cache up to 256MB.

The "new" high spin P300 3.5 inch Desktop PC Hard Drive comes with 2TB storage capacity and its designed for desktop, PC computing, gaming and storage applications, where performance, capacity and reliability are all critical, these drives support 7200RPM operation and each feature a 6Gbit/s SATA interface.

Key to the elevated performance delivered by the new P300 Desktop PC Hard Drive is the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology that they leverage. Here overlapped tracks enable higher data density, so only the required magnetic surface is needed for correct reading. This is advantageous compared to conventional magnetic recording (CMR), where each track has to be separated by a small distance. Consequently, the SMR approach allows higher capacities to be attained within the same magnetic area as a CMR drive, leading to a lower total cost of ownership (TCO). The cache-architecture means that random re-writing issues can be mitigated.

The 2TB P300 high spin model includes a 256MB buffer, so that a sustained transfer rate up to 210 MB/s can be provided, which is a 19% increase in data transfer speed compared to our conventional P300 Desktop PC Hard Drive series. These figures make the new P300 drives a highly optimized choice for addressing growing desktop computing demands, as well as web applications, gaming and data archiving work.

The PC300 series starts from 500GB up to 6TB models. However due to their different specs, things can be somewhat messy, so we try to clear it up for you. There are two different series of HDD with either CMR or SMR recording technology. There are key differences in their rotating speed and overall performance as follows:

As we can see, the new PC300 2TB HDD from Toshiba comes with a new codename HDWD320.

- Retail package

We received a sample unit from Toshiba as a bulk sealed antistatic case. The HDD drive can be found online at various stores depending your region ~70Euro with the model number HDWD320UZSVA.

Below is a close up from the external product label.

Inside you will find the HDD itself that connects with SATA 6.0 port to the motherboard.

After connecting the HDD to the system, we formatted the disk and we users can expect 1.81TB of useable free space.

The ClystalDiskInfo software gives us more information about the installed drive, our sample came with KS001A firmware.