Toshiba L200 2TB Laptop PC Internal Hard Drive 5400 RPM SATA 6Gb/s 128MB Cache 2.5 inch 9.5mm Height – HDWL120XZSTA (RETAIL PACKAGE)

Pros: This drive arrives nicely cushioned in small retail box.

It’s very quiet. In open air there is a barely audible tick when seeking. When installed in a laptop, it’s nearly silent.

Temperatures are very reasonable. SMART indicated a maximum temperature of 43 degrees C reached during testing in open air. After a week of use in a laptop, this maximum remained 43 degrees C.

While evaluating this drive, I ran the same tests on a few other drives for comparison:
Seagate 1 TB 3.5″ SSHD 7200 RPM / 8 GB, model ST1000DX002
Seagate 1 TB 2.5″ SSHD 5400 RPM / 8 GB, model ST1000LM014
Seagate 1 TB 2.5″ 5400 RPM, model ST1000LM024
Samsung 500 GB 2.5″ 7200 RPM, model HM500JJ
Toshiba 160 GB 2.5″ 7200 RPM, model MK1656GSY
Sandisk 500 GB SSD, model SDSSDH3-500G

For sequential read/write evaluation I prefer benchmarks that measure the entire surface of the disk. HD Tune’s min/max results show the difference between the faster (outer) tracks and the slower (inner) tracks of the disk while reading:

This drive: 66.7 MB/s min, 150.3 MB/s max, 115.7 MB/s average.
Seagate 1 TB 3.5″ SSHD: 93.7 MB/s min, 195.4 MB/s max, 162.0 MB/s average.
Seagate 1 TB 2.5″ SSHD: 57.2 MB/s min, 114.1 MB/s max, 89.8 MB/s average.
Seagate 1 TB 2.5″: 50.8 MB/s min, 112.7 MB/s max, 86.7 MB/s average.
Samsung 500 GB 2.5″: 53.6 MB/s min, 99.4 MB/s max, 79.0 MB/s average.
Toshiba 160 GB 2.5″: 36.0 MB/s min, 74.1 MB/s max, 58.1 MB/s average.
Sandisk 500 GB SSD: 313.1 MB/s min, 401.6 MB/s max, 335.2 MB/s average.

This drive outperformed all the other 2.5″ spinning disks by a considerable margin, with average speed over 25 MB/s higher than the second fastest.

The average access time across the entire disk as reported by HD Tune:
This drive: 15.6 ms.
Seagate 1 TB 3.5″ SSHD: 14.0 ms.
Seagate 1 TB 2.5″ SSHD: 19.4 ms.
Seagate 1 TB 2.5″: 19.5 ms.
Samsung 500 GB 2.5″: 15.5 ms.
Toshiba 160 GB 2.5″: 16.7 ms.
Sandisk 500 GB SSD: 0.1 ms.

Although this drive spins at 5400 RPM, the average access time nearly matched the fastest 7200 RPM 2.5″ drive in this test.

Cons: To evaluate write performance I wiped the disks and ran h2testw, which writes and reads all available space and reports the average speed of each:

This drive: 68.7 MB/s write, 111 MB/s read.
Seagate 1 TB 3.5″ SSHD: 153 MB/s write, 152 MB/s read.
Seagate 1 TB 2.5″ SSHD: 83.9 MB/s write, 87.0 MB/s read.
Seagate 1 TB 2.5″: 79.0 MB/s write, 82.8 MB/s read.
Samsung 500 GB 2.5″: 72.2 MB/s write, 76.6 MB/s read.
Toshiba 160 GB 2.5″: 53.7 MB/s write, 55.6 MB/s read.
Sandisk 500 GB SSD: 276 MB/s write, 290 MB/s read.

Again we see the this drive’s read performance is much faster than the other 2.5″ spinning disks, but the write performance is a little worse than most.

The two-year warranty is underwhelming for a laptop drive at this price point. For comparison, the 2.5″ Seagate FireCuda SSHD carries a five year warranty.

Overall Review: Just a note of caution, be aware that the anti-static bag isn’t sealed or even taped shut. At least I was able to catch the drive before it hit anything solid. 🙂

Pros: +
• Large amount of storage space 2Tb (1859.7 GB formatted in windows)
• 128Mb cache speeds up file access
• Runs cool, Crystal Disk Info reports 32 ºC (89.6 ºF) during normal operation
• Quiet, it doesn’t stand out, or make old school hard drive chugging noises.
• Price

Cons: none.

Overall Review: ~
I’ve been using this as the boot drive on my laptop, its proven to be a solid performer throughout my usage and testing. I have had no hiccups at all since initializing and formatting the drive.

I cloned my existing laptop hard drive to this drive after initializing it on my PC, it was a fairly easy process.
Having a good preparation for cloning is a must. If you would like to go the route of cloning, using cloning software and some basic windows command lines is essential.
If the cloning software makes a clone but the drive won’t boot to windows, then you will need to get into the technical end of windows recovery: You should typically have a bootable windows recovery USB before you begin the process, so you can access the windows command prompt in recovery. Have windows command lines associated with rebuilding the MBR and related boot commands, such as bootrec /fixmbr, /fixboot and /rebuildbcd.
Usually that is all you will need to get a clone drive to launch windows, if it wont boot from the cloned drive. Many times cloning software will successfully work without the need to get into the technical end of fixing the boot record, but being prepared will take the headache out, if it doesn’t go smoothly.
(I used freeware cloning software)

For a mechanical drive it performs very well for its price point, its not going to win any speed awards over a SSD, but should be a perfect fit for the average user that needs more space.
Other worthy applications of this drive would be a small form factor Home Theater PC, or NUC, that have limited physical space constraints for adding drives.

Real world benchmark test:
I copied a Picture folder from a Micro SD card, connected through a direct USB adapter, to the desktop of my laptop. (The Micro SD card is just a standard SanDisk, nothing high speed or fancy).
The folder contained a modest 3.67GB made up of 7,143 photos.
The transfer took approximately 4:06 (four minutes, six seconds), measuring with my non-scientific method of using the stopwatch on my phone.

Crystal Disk Mark:
First test once drive was initialized connected to my desktop PC:
i7, 16GB ram
CrystalDiskMark 6.0.1 x64
Sequential Read : 150.456 MB/s
Sequential Write: 158.005 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q 8,T 8) : 0.572 MB/s [139.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q 8,T 8) : 7.078 MB/s [1728.0 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q 32,T 1) : 0.579 MB/s [141.4 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q 32,T 1) : 7.093 MB/s [1731.7 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q 1,T 1) : 0.459 MB/s [112.1 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q 1,T 1) : 6.728 MB/s [1642.6 IOPS]
_____

Laptop results after 30 days of use:
i5, 4GB ram
CrystalDiskMark 6.0.1 x64
Sequential Read : 144.126 MB/s
Sequential Write: 149.074 MB/s
Random Read 4KiB (Q 8,T 8) : 0.854 MB/s [208.5 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q 8,T 8) : 4.253 MB/s [1038.3 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q 32,T 1) : 0.838 MB/s [204.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q 32,T 1) : 3.839 MB/s [937.3 IOPS]
Random Read 4KiB (Q 1,T 1) : 0.398 MB/s [97.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KiB (Q 1,T 1) : 4.482 MB/s [1094.2 IOPS]

The somewhat slower test results on my laptop can be associated with its age, slower processor and limited ram. Both my PC and laptop are running windows 10 pro x64.

Overall I have been pleased with the performance and absolutely satisfied with the copious amount of space. The real world transfer test I performed surpassed my expectations of speed, and I was pleasantly surprised. The Crystal DiskMark results were in the margin of speed you would expect from a drive in this category and no real shock at the reported speeds. It wont match the speed of an SSD, but until you can get a 2TB drive at the same price, that’s a fairly petty argument.
The 2 year warranty is a pretty standard offering for drives in this price range, and I wouldn’t use that as a measure of long term reliability. I have hard drives in use and still working that are well beyond their manufacturers warranty period.

I would absolutely recommend this drive for anyone that needs to upgrade their laptop storage space or looking to build or expand a HTPC or NUC PC.
4.5 Eggs

Pros: Toshiba hard drives have a lot going for them. They come in packaging with the type of packing material I like to see with a hard drive. It’s simple, but extremely effective. They come in a small box with an inflated hard drive protector that’s a perfect fit for the hard drive inside of it. With this protecting your drive, it would have to be handled extremely roughly during shipment to damage the drive. Also, I like them because they’re nice to store old used hard drives in them. Inside the packaging, your drive comes inside of an anti-static bag, as you’d expect.
The 1 TB variant of these drives operates on a SATA 6 Gb/sec interface, have 128 MB of cache and spin at 5400 RPMs. The noise level of this hard drive is pretty minimal, I typically can’t hear it over top of my laptops cooling fan.
Using Crystal Disk Mark, AS SSD benchmarks and AIDA 64. Sequential Read and Write times averaged right around 150 MB/sec pretty much across the board on a new drive. As the drive approached full, speeds degraded closer to the 90 MB/sec sequential read and write mark.

Cons: None at this time.

Overall Review: My laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad T420 with an Intel Core i5 2520M. I got it on sale from Newegg for an extremely good price. It was a refurb that came with a 320 GB hard drive. I typically use my laptop for downloading all types of large files that I don’t want to burden my desktop PC’s SSD with. So the 320 GB hard drive it came with was far from practical for my use case. I needed a lot more storage, but I don’t want to spend a lot on a hard drive for a laptop I got for cheap. That just wouldn’t make sense. Looking at all the various laptop hard drives in the “cheap as possible” price range doesn’t give a lot of options for performance hard drives. Typically, there you’ll only find eco hard drives. Mainly designed for power saving. In that category, this Toshiba drive stands out. It doesn’t have the max RPM you’d want in a performance HDD, but all the rest of the specs are pretty impressive. 128 MB of cache until recently has been reserved for only high end hard drives and the read and write speeds are very respectable.
I actually own and operate 4 Toshiba hard drives. I have a RAID 0 array with a couple desk top HDDs, this drive and a portable 1TB drive, which I suspect might have this hard drive inside of it. I’ve never had any issues with any of them so far. They’re decent performing drives for a great price. Which is why I keep buying them.

All things considered I think these drives are a great value. They come well packaged, the price to performance ratio is really good and they have a 2 year warranty. I am giving these drives a 4 Egg rating. I don’t really have a problem with these drives, but I just don’t think they deserve 5 Eggs.

Pros: + With a lot of newer notebooks on the market that use an M.2 SSD as the main drive, they also have space for a standard laptop hard drive. This particular drive serves very well as a secondary storage hard drive.

+ Good speed for a 2TB laptop hard drive with speeds ranging from 130MB/s to 60MB/s especially when considering general storage requirements vs. main hard drive.

+ Very quiet and runs relatively cool.

+ 128MB Cache is provided even though the drive is only 5,400rpm

+ 2 year warranty vs. more common 1 year

+ Does not constantly spin down when not in use compared to some of competitors’ hard drives. As a result, there is less wear and tear on this drive.

Cons: – 9.5mm height reducing compatibility with laptops requiring 7mm height hard drives.

– The retail package doesn’t include anything more than bare drives. Toshiba could have at least included 4x screws.

Overall Review: Even though the drive will have adequate performance as the main system drive, a recommendation would still be to use an SSD as the primary drive and this 2TB Toshiba hard drive as storage hard drive.

Also, it would have been better to have a longer warranty such as 5-year that is found on some of the competition’s laptop drives.

Pros: – Large capacity
– Large cache size
– Good speeds for a laptop drive

Cons: – 9.5mm height – won’t fit in many devices
– 2 year warranty

Overall Review: This HDD offers large capacity in a relatively small footprint. The 128MB of cache helps this drive perform better than expected for a standard HDD. My testing on an empty drive yielded sequential reads and writes around 150MB/s which is quite good for a 5400RPM drive. However, if you try to use this drive for an operating system, you may end up disappointed. The random speeds of a hard drive are no match for a solid state drive.

As a test, I cloned a SSD to this drive and tested both in an older laptop. With the SSD Windows 7 took just less than 30 seconds to load and be in a usable state and Microsoft Word took about 4 seconds to launch. With this HDD on the other hand, Windows took well over a minute to load (and another minute to be truly usable) and Word took over 20 seconds to launch. This is not a fault of this particular HDD, rather a fault of spinning media in general. With the availability of SSDs, I cannot recommend this HDD (or any other HDD for that matter) as a primary drive.

But, that does not mean this drive is useless. It would work well as a secondary drive or an external drive to store photos or music or games on. It would also make a good upgrade to a game console. The one thing to watch out for is the height. At 9.5mm this drive is thicker than its competitors and may not fit in many devices. Even some older laptops have a maximum drive height of 7mm.

Overall, I have no problems with this drive, yet I would have a hard time recommending it. At the time of writing this review, there are drives from competitors with better warranties at a lower price. But, if you catch this drive on sale and are looking for some 2.5″ storage, put it on your list. Just make sure your device can handle the 9.5mm height.

Pros: – Low Power Draw – < Less than 1 watt
– Cost for storage – relatively cheap for 1 Tb
– 7 MM – will fit most of today’s laptops
– Quiet – as compared to older disk drives

Cons: – Cannot compete with an SSD for performance
– 2 Year warranty – why not 3 or even 5 years?

Overall Review: To test this drive, I installed it in my aging Toshiba Satellite laptop. It originally came with a Toshiba 320GB laptop drive and Windows 7. I have since installed a HP 700 Pro SSD and migrated over to Windows 10. While the laptop is ancient by today’s standards; I do not use it for gaming, it performs very well and has never given me any problems. With the SSD it is very responsive for day to day tasks. Let me add, I understand that I am not comparing apples to apples, but more like apples and grapefruits. While I do not hold high regard for benchmark tests and specs, I did run AS SSD Benchmark before installing the L200. Just to have a means to compare results. Well the difference in performance between the two drives was quite noticeable. I did not need to study test results to explain it to me. The tests did show a vast difference in access times and surely that helps to explain it. If you want to see test results, I won’t bore you with mine as there are plenty of them plastered in other reviews. The boot time was back to square one. Push the power button and go for coffee, well not quite that bad. I normally put it to sleep anyway so no big deal there. The normal user who uses a regular laptop drive would be happy with the Toshiba L200 as a replacement or for additional storage.
It would make a great replacement for a PS4 hard drive. Purchasing 1TB for $50 or even less on sale seems like a pretty decent deal if you are on a budget. However if performance is what you are after, then by all means spend an additional $50 and pick up a 500Gb SSD on sale. If I had the extra slot I would use the Toshiba for added storage. I think I will install it in an external enclosure and use it for pictures, videos, music and backups. In summary, I think the Toshiba L200 1TB is a great drive depending on the purchaser’s intended use and budget. If you are shopping for a dependable 2.5″ platter drive for storage than this Toshiba will satisfy the day to day consumer. If it is performance you are after for your main OS, then by all means go SSD – don’t settle for less!

Pros: – Extremely quiet
– Price is great
– Retail packaging, while sparse, was well protected
– When empty, drive is extremely fast
– 2 Year Warranty
– 128 MB Cache
– Runs cool to the touch even under load

Cons: – 5400 RPM (but is it really a con knowing that’s the type of drive you are buying?)
– When full, speeds do slow down
– Random access, when full, is slow but not unexpectedly slow given that, again, it’s a 5400 rpm drive

Overall Review: I’m honestly pretty surprised how well this drive performed. Using HD Tach when empty, I saw bursts at 394 MB/s. Sequential speeds are pretty good as well and stay consistently over 100 MB/s up until you pass the 700 GB marker. After that it continues to drop down to 60 MB/s. Still, this is quite respectable for this type of hard drive.

With Crystal Mark these were the results:

Read: 149.8 MB/s
Write: 158.0 MB/s

Make no mistake this is not a powerful SSD or even 7200 RPM hard drive, but it holds it’s own and for the price is a great idea if you need to add secondary storage to a laptop or you can’t afford a 1 TB SSD. The 2 year warranty is good for a drive of this class. I would definitely keep this on my short list.

Pros: 2 year warranty
128MB cache

Cons: 2 year warranty-competing products have a 5 year warranty
No mounting screws or SATA cable included with drive described as “retail”
Tech information hard to come by

Overall Review: The drive came in a retail box, pegboard hanger, nothing but the drive in a protective pak. No screws, cable or documentation. For those with no experience in this area let me mention that it’s common practice not to include mounting hardware or cables with disk drives to save a few pennies.

New PC users may get spoofed when the drive isn’t recognized. I used the win 10 disk manager to set the drive up. The drive does not come partitioned. Use your OS disk management to set it up.

The drive showed average speeds of 150mb/s on file copies and benchmarks. With a rotational speed of 5400 the L200 is not going to match even the cheapest SSD on market for raw performance.

I ran a couple of full surface tests on the drive and it passed with no faults detected. The drive was virtually silent.

The competition in this segment is big with the L200 not offering any features to make it a stand out.
For example a Seagate FireCuda with its SSD caching system and five year warranty might draw a buyer where the “plain jane” Toshiba might not, even at the higher price per MB cost.

My experience with Toshiba products has been above average for long enough that I feel confident I’ll get good service out of the drive. A 5 year warranty shows confidence even at the higher the buy-in price. Or the vendor accepts to eat a lot of defective products to maintain a market share. I’ve had during my 25+ years in computing minimal hard disk failures among the major brands. I still have some sea gate scsi drives from the 90’s that run just fine. OS in my view tends to be more responsible for data loss events then mechanical/controller failure

The Acer Asprie7 laptop included in its box a set of mounting screws for the second hard drive, they often need to be special ordered. Using the wrong screws can damage the drive or your laptop. There is no good way to rig something like that. you must have the screws.

Use great care when installing a laptop drive. The connecting cable in a laptop is often fragile and a slip will ruin your day.

In the storage market prices have been falling as capacities rise nothing to see here. The 2.5 market carriers a premium due to size. At this point in time the L200 is a good fit for an average laptop user, in a few ways. It is a good idea to wait for a sale since discounts have been good with large desktop drives dropping the price per MB to low levels. 2.5 inch drives are getting denser also.

I’ll be back in a few months to let you know how we’re doing, but my experience with drives has been like most of you. If it’s a dud, it will happen quickly, once you get past that, it’s typically smooth sailing.

Given the lack of documentation I’ll drop it an egg as I had to drag around a search engine for a while to find a spec on how much power the drive draws and the MTBF hours. I did find a storage utility application. A basic disk checker and some technical specs for the geek crowd. ( in the event you wanted to use this drive for a robotic project)

The L200 laptop drive gets 4 eggs.
It worked out of the box
It’s quiet
Passed surface tests
Average price

Your results of course will vary.