Toshiba is considered the silent giant of the storage industry. This includes the 2.5-inch drive that is used inside your branded laptop, the Canvio sitting on your desk, or the P300 located in your family PC. Below is a Toshiba-specific look into where their drives are utilised, how they typically fail, and how the data recovery process occurs.
Toshiba’s 2.5-inch drives have been shipping in laptops bearing the name brand of almost anyone. Toshiba’s recoveries are also laptop recoveries. Laptop recoveries tend to involve small drives, having very difficult life cycles (drops, bumps etc.), and all utilising similar imaging-first cures.
Toshiba’s hard drives tend to live out their days inside someone else’s laptops; therefore, all but a small number of the defects we experience in Toshiba drives are, basically, common defects found in most laptops. Of course, first and foremost among those defects is impact damage from an accident. A 2.5-inch drive is relatively fragile. When your Toshiba 2.5-inch drive happens to be spinning and a bag falls off your shoulder, the head of the drive can slam into the top of the platters, and it will either click away or arrive completely silent. It then needs a head transplant, a procedure with odds of success which depend almost exclusively on how often it has been turned on since falling. Next up is normal wear. Laptop drives tend to get very hot and run in a very confined space as they also frequently start/stop due to battery life; and thus a typical hard drive such as Toshiba’s L200 tends to simply get old: the slowdowns and freezes of our seven warning signs scaled down to a single drive. Finally, Toshiba external Canvio drives tend to die at their USB bridge rather than their internal disks. Desktop Toshiba P300 drives and NAS-quality Toshiba N300 drives typically fail by failing some part of the drive (a circuit board, a head, firmware) just like every other type of drive, and they are repaired just like every other type of drive.
Most of the Toshiba work sent to us appears like a non-starting laptop. So, the most valuable information we can pass along to someone concerned about their laptop is that we don’t fix laptops. We have a data recovery laboratory where we work on disks. It’s about recovering your data from the disk and leaving the rest of the laptop alone. This way of looking at this makes sense when, even though an old machine may be fixed with a new drive, there are still some files which cannot be replaced. Thus, the most important decisions regarding repairing or replacing an old computer should not be based on guessing what will happen during a high-street reinstall. Instead, they should be made after all the irreplaceable items have been removed. (And almost every time, this means that a non-working laptop was turned back on and made operational again through the simple process of installing a fresh version of Windows directly across the top of all your photos.) If the laptop doesn’t turn on and the disk does function properly, then we recover your data quickly. However, if the disk also fails, then our laptop & PC lane and our hard drive bench will take care of the problem. This includes those older Toshiba drives whose odd connections prevent them from using the caddies used by other data recovery companies.
The process starts with a complimentary 48-hour diagnostic where the disk is removed from the laptop or Canvio enclosure and evaluated truthfully for its condition. Following this, the typical sequence will be followed (with Toshiba’s firmware families accounted for). Any electronic repairs are performed at board level which ensures that the original calibration of the hard drive remains intact. In the event of a drop case, the heads will be replaced using a head unit from a matching donor. Once complete, the disk will undergo one gentle imaging cycle on our equipment designed to gently coax data off reluctant disks. After the imaging cycle has been completed, the files will be extracted from the resulting image. A written quote will be provided prior to any charges being incurred for any of the repair work. Additionally, in most cases you only pay if we recover your data, regardless of whether the item on the bench is a current Canvio model or an older MK-series model from a laptop that nobody wants to open.
Virtually no consumer has purchased a Toshiba drive as an individual purchase, yet nearly half of all consumers have at least one. Toshiba is a major OEM manufacturer, with Toshiba’s 2.5-inch drives shipping inside many different branded laptops such as Dell, HP and Lenovo. Thusly, a common name found on these devices that end up on our workbench each week is Toshiba; they are never purchased by a customer, but rather arrive as part of a laptop whose internal storage has failed.
Only in having a USB bridge and case to enclose it. When you look at a Toshiba 2.5-inch drive enclosed in a Canvio (which is essentially a standard Toshiba 2.5-inch drive enclosed in a housing), the most likely failure point of this product will be the USB bridge board instead of the actual 2.5-inch drive. Therefore, if your Canvio has stopped functioning, there is a good chance that the actual 2.5-inch drive may still function and simply needs to be removed from the bad housing. An added bonus is that Toshiba’s Canvios do not typically use hardware encryption to protect the data stored on them like some other brands’ products do. This simplifies recovering the files from a failed Canvio because you do not need to first decrypt the information prior to recovery.
Better than the fall would suggest if done right. The small 2.5-inch hard drive disks don’t fare well with impact; their heads are supported by a ramp system, however one could knock them off onto the platter surface from a live drop. After that, it is all about what happens next. If there were no other attempts to turn the disk back on, get it to a workbench immediately; this is your best bet. Waiting two weeks while “I’ll just try turning it back on again”: these are the odds we’d think you’d be expecting.
Free 48-hour diagnostic in the lab: laptops, Canvios, P300s and OEM drives with someone else’s badge on the lid.