14 DAY TRIAL // The fact that Toshiba's HDDs deliver quite an impressive level of performance in a wide array of applications is not exactly a big surprise, but it seems that the Japanese company is keen on further proving its superiority via series of benchmarks.
So, in order to provide some backing for their claims regarding the level of computing efficiency provided by its MBF series drives, Toshiba set up a really advanced testing system, consisting of a serious Supermicro SuperChassis 216E26 2U 24-bay system featuring a powerful X8DT3-F motherboard with dual Intel Xeon E5520 processors.
Of course, in order to make things fair, the system described above was subjected to two different sets of tests, one involving Toshiba's own MBF2600RC HDDs arranged in a RAID 5 configuration, and the other a couple of (unnamed) 2.5-inch mainstream industry HDDs of similar form factor and capacity (600GB).
Naturally, the results were quite impressive, Toshiba's HDDs managing to deliver not only significantly better transfer speeds (a 14.7 percent gain in terms of read speeds and a 9 percent gain in terms of write speeds), but also superior idle power (4.0 Watts vs. 5.0 Watts), better seek time track-to-track (0.2/0.4 ms vs. 0.3/0.55 ms) and also a superior average seek time (4.0/4.4 ms vs. 4.0/4.54 ms), compared to the mainstream HDDs.
“The benchmark testing demonstrates that Toshiba HDDs deliver the best features and performance to meet the needs of both enterprise and SMB customers,” said Joel Hagberg, vice president of enterprise marketing at Toshiba Storage Device Division.
Of course, we're pretty sure that Toshiba's HDDs are really capable of delivering quite an impressive level of performance, but nevertheless, we should remember that such results have to be taken with a pinch of salt, simply because other manufacturers might also make the same claims using a different setup for this purpose.