Toshiba L300 Series Continuous Faulty Hard Disk Drive

"I have absolutely no doubt that something causes drives fitted in Toshiba L300 series laptops to fail almost out of the box."

Recently I have been keeping a record of the Toshiba L300 series laptops that have come through my hands for repair purposes. Over the last 6 months I have seen a total of 27 L300 series laptops, 25 of them having the same fault - a faulty hard disk drive - and the remaining 2 having basic issues such as broken screens or keyboards. This equates to an average of 4 laptops (of the same make and model series) per month having the same issue.

The drive supplied from the factory is a standard 120GB SATA drive manufactured by Toshiba Storage Co., so there's nothing unusual about that, and if a hard disk drive is faulty then you simply replace it right? This is what I had thought, but it seems to be a little trickier than that.

I have tried fitting every make of 160GB SATA drive that I can lay my hands on. Hitachi, Western Digital, Samsung, MDT and Seagate. All these drives failed again within 48 hours. I use 3 different branded enterprise-ready diagnostic testing software packages and all 3 fail the drive on READ, WRITE and SMART EXTENDED tests.

At first I thought it was the drives I had been using, so I changed brand. To rule out a faulty batch of drives (and a heavy-handed postman) I even changed supplier. I tried 4 different suppliers and 5 brands of drive in total. The MDT drive I expected to fail anyway - they are just refurbished drives from other manufacturers sold as new with a slightly less capacity - but for all these drives to fail from all these different suppliers did not make sense. I even checked that they from different batches and tried to mix old and new stock to give an accurate result.

I find it extremely rare that these drives would fail within a 48 hour period, and consistently produce the same result. Keep in mind that this is over a 6 month period too.

I considered the possibility that my diagnostic software wasn't compatible with the controller, or that there were other factors that could be affecting the test result. With this in mind I tried testing the drives BEFORE and AFTER in another machine with a known consistently accurate test result. Before the drives were fitted inside the laptops they were fine, and after they were re-tested 48 hours later they had failed. This now ruled out incompatible software running on the test Toshiba machine.

The drives were literally unusable in other machines and even as USB storage devices when housed in top-brand USB enclosures. They clicked, clunked and sometimes even power cycled for no apparent reason. I have absolutely no doubt that something causes drives fitted in Toshiba L300 series laptops to fail almost out of the box.

As a second experiment I purchased a brand new Toshiba Satellite L300 and gave it to a friend to use as any regular person would for exactly 30 days. I tested the drive immediately after opening the box and it passed all tests without even a sign of potential failure. After 1 month I re-tested the drive. The drive failed the SMART EXTENDED test, but passed the READ and WRITE tests. It did not click or power-cycle.

I'm not really sure what to conclude from this. It would appear that something (and I wouldn't even like to attempt to guess) causes drives to fail when being used in this model/series of laptop. This appears to affect all lines, including Satellite and Equium. To make matters worse I had also started looking at Toshiba Satellite 405D laptops and these are starting to show signs of the same thing. It's too early to say for certain, but I wanted to bring this into the public light and see if anybody responded with any comments on their own experience on these.

As of now I have stopped fitting new drives into any Toshiba L3xx and L4xx series laptops as I cannot deal with the amount of warranty returns and extra workload that this introduces. I would like to point out that Toshiba as a manufacturer are generally pretty reliable and will obviously resolve any issues that you have under warranty within the first year of purchase. I deal with several hundred laptops a month and no other make, model or series presents the problem for me.