Toshiba is one of the largest suppliers of 2.5-inch drives to laptop manufacturers, so a great many people are using one without ever having decided to. That shapes the failure patterns we see and how these arrive.
A repair shop is judged on returning a machine that boots, which often means fitting a new drive. A recovery lab is judged on the files. On a failing disk those are separate jobs done in a particular order.
Toshiba's presence in this laboratory is dominated by 2.5-inch laptop drives, because that is where Toshiba's volume is. The MQ family in particular has been fitted to an enormous number of machines, and it arrives here having suffered the thing laptop drives suffer: impact.
That gives Toshiba jobs a different profile from desktop manufacturers. Head crash after a drop is the leading presentation rather than gradual wear, and the outcome depends heavily on whether the machine was running when it fell.
The enterprise MG range is the other stream — array members out of servers, usually arriving as part of a multi-disk job rather than alone.
MQ01ABD, MQ04ABF 2.5-inch The volume laptop drive. Head crash after impact is the usual presentation. Donor availability is good.
P300 desktop Consumer 3.5-inch duty. Conventional mechanical failures, generally through age rather than event.
X300 performance Higher RPM desktop drives. Run hotter and arrive with more thermal history than the P300 range.
MG series enterprise SATA and SAS array members out of servers. Usually part of an array job rather than standalone.
N300 NAS Continuous duty in multi-bay units. Surface wear rather than shock damage.
Canvio externals 2.5-inch drives in simple enclosures. Straightforward construction; failures are usually the disk rather than the bridge.
A drive dropped while parked frequently survives with nothing worse than a stuck head stack, and those recover completely. One dropped while spinning may have driven its heads into the platter, and that scoring is permanent.
The worst case is a drive that kept running after the impact, dragging damaged heads across the surface for hours. If a laptop has been dropped and the drive has developed any new noise, switching it off immediately is worth more than anything we can do afterwards.
Get it diagnosed rather than concluding. Screens, boards and connectors all fail on impact while the drive stays perfectly healthy.
Mechanical, and urgent. Switch it off. The outcome depends on whether it was running at the time and how long it ran afterwards.
Not for the MQ family, which we stock. Older and enterprise families take longer to source, which affects timescale rather than outcome.
Then send every member of the array labelled by bay, not just the failed one. Array work starts from £500 +VAT.
From £300 +VAT for a single drive, fixed in writing after the free diagnostic. Mechanical work carries a 50% deposit.