Toshiba 12TB N300 Pro NAS Hard Drive Falls to $429.99 at Newegg
Newegg cut the 12TB Toshiba N300 Pro NAS drive from $529.99 to $429.99, a $100 saving. The CMR drive runs at 7,200 RPM with 512MB cache and a five-year warranty.
The N300 Pro is a 3.5-inch mechanical drive built specifically for NAS enclosures. It uses conventional magnetic recording (CMR), spins at 7,200 RPM, carries 512MB of cache and connects over a SATA 6Gb/s interface. Toshiba backs it with a five-year warranty.
TechRadar said the CMR design matters for NAS buyers because it avoids the write-performance compromises associated with shingled magnetic recording (SMR), and that the 7,200 RPM speed and 512MB cache make the drive a better fit than slower 5,400 RPM NAS models. The 12TB capacity, the publication noted, leaves room for backups, media libraries, business files and surveillance footage while allowing a high-capacity array to be built without occupying every drive bay.
Toshiba positions the N300 Pro range for enterprise NAS use rather than ordinary desktop storage, and TechRadar cited the five-year warranty as an advantage for buyers who intend to run a drive for several years.
At $429.99, the drive works out to about $35.83 per terabyte, a premium over general-purpose hard drives. TechRadar framed that premium as the cost of a 7,200 RPM CMR model designed for continuous NAS operation and covered by a longer warranty.
The publication also listed the trade-offs. As a traditional mechanical hard drive, it does not offer SSD-like transfer speeds, near-silent operation or the low power consumption of flash storage, and its main purpose is dependable bulk NAS capacity rather than speed. TechRadar added that total system cost matters for multi-bay builds: four of the drives would cost about $1,720 at the current price, and usable capacity would be lower if the array is configured with RAID redundancy.
On suitability, TechRadar advised buying the N300 Pro for a NAS that runs continuously, including demanding home, small-business and enterprise setups, and advised skipping it for anyone simply seeking the cheapest way to add large-capacity storage to a desktop PC, where a less expensive general-purpose drive would make more sense.