Toshiba is one of the largest suppliers of 2.5-inch drives to laptop makers, and as such, there are a great many users who never had the opportunity to decide whether or not they wanted to use one. This shapes the way failures occur and how they get to us.
Repair shops are usually evaluated based upon their ability to restore a computer back into a bootable state. This often entails installing a new hard drive. Recovery labs evaluate themselves on the number of files recovered from a failing hard drive. On a failing drive you do two different things in a particular order.
The majority of Toshiba equipment seen in this lab consists of 2.5-inch laptop drives. This is due to Toshiba’s high production levels of this type of device. In particular, the MQ series has been installed into an extremely high number of computers and arrives in our facility having experienced the most common problem associated with laptops: being dropped.
Toshiba jobs therefore have a different profile to those of desktop manufacturers. Presentations are primarily head crashes after a drop, as opposed to gradual wear, and the outcome depends heavily on whether or not the unit was operating at the time it dropped.
The enterprise MG line is the second stream: disks from server-based arrays, which usually come in as part of a multi-disk job (as opposed to single disks).
MQ01ABD, MQ04ABF 2.5-inch The high-volume laptop drive. The common cause of failure when these fail is a head crash after an impact. These drives have good donor availability.
P300 desktop A 3.5-inch drive for general consumer use. When it develops problems, they are conventional mechanical ones, generally due to age rather than a specific event.
X300 performance Desktop drives that spin faster at higher RPMs. These run hotter and arrive with more thermal history than the P300 range.
MG series enterprise SATA and SAS members of arrays on servers. Typically included as a group for an array project, rather than a single drive.
N300 NAS Drives intended to be continuously used in multi-bay systems. Damage is typically from surface wear, not shock.
Canvio externals 2.5-inch drives in standard cases. These enclosures have a straightforward design, so if a Canvio fails, the problem usually lies with the disk itself, and not the interface.
A drop whilst parked frequently results in nothing worse than a stuck head stack, and those drives recover completely. A drop during spin could cause the heads to scrape against the disk, causing irreversible damage.
The most severe scenario would be a drive that continues to run after an impact. In this case, damaged heads continue to move across the disk for hours. If your laptop has been dropped and you are experiencing any unusual noises from your hard drive, switch it off immediately. Doing that is worth more than anything we can do afterwards.
Get it diagnosed rather than jumping to conclusions. Screens, circuit boards and connectors can all be damaged upon impact while the hard drive itself stays perfectly healthy.
Mechanical, and urgent. Turn it off. The outcome depends on whether the unit was operating at the time of the fall and for how long it ran before being turned off.
Not for our stocked MQ series. Older units (and enterprise units) are harder to find. This impacts the timeframe, but does not affect the outcome.
Then send all members of the array labelled by bay (not just the faulty one). Array work starts at £500 +VAT.
A single drive from £300 +VAT. The price will be fixed, in writing, once we have completed the complimentary diagnostic. A 50% deposit will be taken for mechanical repairs.