Toshiba says it has increased the S300 Pro’s surveillance disk drive’s transfer rate by doubling its cache capacity.
The 3.5-inch form factor S300 Pro uses conventional magnetic recording with 4, 6, 8 and 10 TB capacities. It sits alongside the S300 shingled magnetic recording media drive in the Toshiba surveillance drive line-up. Both are air-filled drives with the S300 having 6, 8 and 10 TB capacity points. The 2020-era S300 Pro had a 256 MB cache and a maximum sustained transfer rate of 248 MBps. The new edition has a 512 MiB (537 MB) cache and its max transfer rate is 13.3 percent faster at 281 MBps.
The workload rate has increased as well, from the 2020 drive’s 180 TB/year to the new drive’s 300 TB/year. It supports 600,000 load/unload cycles, has a 1.2 million hours MTBF rating and a 3-year warranty. As before it has a SATA 6Gbitps interface and spins at 7,200rpm.
The new drive’s weight varies with its capacity: 10TB – 755g, 8TB – 730g, 6TB – 710g, 4TB – 690g. We understand this is because each 2TB increment in capacity adds a platter and read/write head assembly to the drive. That implies the 4TB drives has 2 x 2 TB platters and the 10TB version 5 x 2 TB platters.
The drive supports up to 64 video cameras and can be used in an up to 24-bay cabinet. Toshiba said in a statement that users “get the capacity to record and playback video’d events in real-time and high resolution, and with object identification and face recognition.”
Toshiba competitor Seagate launched a 10-platter, 20TB SkyHawk video surveillance drive in 2022. Its current video surveillance drive webpage lists 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8TB Skyhawk drives only though.
Western Digital’s Purple brand drives are its video surveillance drives and these have a 1TB to 14 TB capacity range.The 14TB version has a 64 MB cache and an up to 110 MBps transfer rate, far slower than Toshiba’s claim for the S300 Pro.
WD also has a Purple Pro Smart Video Surveillance product, with an 8TB to 24TB capacity range, a 256 MB cache and an up to 267 MBps transfer rate; again slower than Toshiba’s S300 Pro.
Seagate and WD’s larger capacity video surveillance drives will have helium-filled enclosures and be more costly to manufacture than air-filled drives.
Get an S300 Pro datasheet here.
