Toshiba Enterprise MG Series 3.5" 16TB SATA 3

Toshiba MG08ACA16TE 16TB , The drive was ordered on Nov. 1, and was delivered on the 4th. Great, fast delivery. It was packaged very well, box within a heavy duty box, with great padding. On attaching the drive to my computer, it did not see it, after checking cables and such, I open control panel went to - Administrative Tools - Create and format hard disk. It needed to be formatted and given a disk letter, I did this. It did not show after this, I found out I needed to do the disk Letter again. Once the disk letter was given the drive showed up. It was 14.5 TB - Good enough, for some reason a lot of these drives fall short of the stated capacity. I trust Toshiba drives, great buy.--- Jan. 25, 2023, sorry to say the drive just stop working, my computer just does not see it. I did try basic trouble shooting, but I know one can get bogged down for month trying to figure these things out. Calling it a day and ordering another, did not bother to try and return it.

I barely ran it for 3 days before starting having issues. The problem with this (16TB) drive is it crashes when dealing with many smaller files. It has no issues with moving larger video files. I can transfer those around all day, many terabytes at a time without a problem. But when I move around a few thousand smaller sub 10mb files, it works for about 10 seconds, then makes a brief squealing sound, and just crashes. Its removed from the windows device list and then is found again about 10 seconds later. If I reinitiate the transfer of small files, it just crashes again.So something is up. Not sure if its systemic to the design of these drive (cant handle quick read/writes) or if its just a defective drive but I cannot afford the time to diagnose this issue.Oh one last note. This drive gets very hot. Even when left out on the table exposed, it gets very hot. Much hotter than all my other drives which are actually inside the computer case.

In a world going to SSD drives, or NVME, this may seem old technology.But 16 Terabytes is a LOT of storage.I used this to make full backups of all the computers in the family.Then I just put this one drive in the save.I was able to use with a SATA to USB adapter, one that had it's own power supply.Then ran it from the USB port external.It's fast enough, not SSD but I don't care when making backups.You can't buy this much storage for a reasonable price any other way.And I trust Toshiba.It was obviously brand new, and plugging it in, it had to be initialized, which is good, I'm really the first.

I bought this to expand my Unraid server storage capacity. It works great for my purpose and hasn't let me down yet.

Seemed to be good but only lasted 2.5 years. This the second one as the first I purchased was DOA.

TLDR: Helium-filled drives, smooth installation, good initial performance. 🌐💽⏳I recently opted for these helium-filled drives and so far, they've been a smooth sail at installation. Only time can truly tell how they hold up, but my initial impressions are positive. I plan to update this review if any issues arise.These drives are now part of my Netgear network attached storage setup. A heads-up for those using them similarly: syncing the second 16TB drive with the first can take a few days. Don't panic – it's all part of the process.Also, something to keep in mind, the actual usable storage space is about 14.5 TB, not the full 16 TB as labeled. This isn't unusual, but it's worth noting for those new to such storage solutions.

I chose Platinum Micro as the seller after contacting them with some questions. I got 2 and then ordered 2 more later. All serial numbers showed up with 4.5+ years of warranty still left as shown on Toshiba's Check Warranty site. One drive started having problems down the line and Toshiba RMAed it easily with a brand new drive. Would highly recommend!Just make sure you pick the seller carefully as it looks like a lot of people got drives from other sellers without warranty through Toshiba and some got refurbished ones. I don't know why people don't contact the sellers first since it's not sold directly through the manufacturer on here.They are a little noisy, but that's the way all enterprise drives are.

I bought this in early June 2022 so let's say this has been in use for my media server since July of 2022. 2 days ago stablebit scanner found one unreadable sector so I immediately ordered a replacement. However yesterday, all of a sudden SMART was inaccessible and the drive is unrecognized. I pulled it out and in another PC it wants to be initialized again. So data may or may not be lost (I have snapraid recovering everything as I am typing this) but 2 years for a drive is not quite the best.UPDATE: This is covered under warranty, 5 year. The problem now is contacting anyone about getting a warranty replacement is like talking to my soapdish. I am going to say that this seller, avoid them. Andas forToshiba, DO NOT assume they will honor their warranty but hide behind any and everything they can to NOT cover it.