After Western Digital were forced to sell part of Hitachi’s assets to Toshiba in their acquisition of HGST, some interesting 3.5″ drives would soon appear. This is clearly a Hitachi drive under the surface in most respects, but with a splash of colour for once.
As is with Hitachi drives of this era, these are quite the reliable drives. They were built in the same factory, after all.
Drive Attributes ---------------------------------------- Toshiba P300 HDWD130 ---------------------------------------- Capacity 3TB Mfc Date 2015-09 Format 3.5" Interface SATA Platters 3 Heads 6 Cache 64MB RPM 7200 Protocol Serial-ATA/600 Origin China (TDSC, ex-HGST) ----------------------------------------
This one sports three platters, with a density of 1TB per platter. Clearly, these are what would have become of Hitachi’s three platter architecture had they not been bought out, but at least they saw the light of day in Toshiba. It can certainly be questioned as to whether or not Western Digital would have kept the line, had they also gained the Chinese factory instead.
Toshiba didn’t kill off Hitachi’s label design entirely, as many similarities remain, albeit few.
Interestingly, the KCC identifier (for the Korean Communications Commission) contains “DT01ACA100”, which suggests Toshiba registered the whole line-up using the single 1TB OEM DT01ACA100 as the registration name. Upon searching up the KCC listing (which can be found here), the HDWD130 is listed as a sub-model under the registration. It was applied for on the 5th of July, 2012, which certainly lines up with the acquisition. This is dramatically different compared to how Toshiba handled it with the MK1002TSKB‘s, which utilised the KCC code of the highest-end MK2002TSKB instead.
This is a bulk indicated drive, per the UZSVA model number addition. There isn’t a mechanical difference between this and a standard retail EZSVA version of course, thus HDWD130 is the only element required for the model number.
There’s nothing too fancy under the drive, it’s a bog standard multi-platter Hitachi design.
Some foam and a thermal pad are all this drive has to give when looking under the PCB. A bit of dust too.
LSI provided the microcontroller IC, which is extremely difficult to read (see below for IC readout). The 64MB of cache is from Zentel, a company which was acquired by AP Memory Technology in 2016, apparently being a partner of STMicroelectronics.
The motor controller IC is unbranded, unfortunately, but online searches suggest this exact IC was also previously used on Hitachi’s 7K3000 series.
The PCB is dated as 2015-04-18, so it’s a little older than the rest of the drive.
This drive doesn’t support extended device statistics, so SMART is all we get. Nearing 40k hours, this drive has certainly served its purpose well. It lives on serving as a cold backup solution, but for the most part has been been retired from active use.
With this drive being formatted under EXT4, benchmark options are fairly limited under Windows. Nonetheless, the following results should provide a general picture of what to expect with one of these:
These drives had great value at the time, being exceedingly cheap compared to competing models. Surprisingly, there are variants of this drive out there new enough to bare the UKCA regulatory stamp, thus indicating production has remained steady until at least mid-2021. They’ve certainly had a phenomenal run.
If you missed the video I made on this drive, you can find it here: