In many cases, the drive itself is not actually defective, but the problems arise from the media used, incorrectly installed drivers or software and possibly a faulty operating system. Therefore you should carefully go through the possible sources of error to avoid the effort of replacing the drive. This section of FAQs includes several methods for remedying the problem. If this doesn't help, please contact our hotline.

If the drive is actually defective, you have to distinguish between the following two possibilities:

1. If the drive was installed in another device (e.g. PC, laptop, external housing, MP3 player, etc.) when purchased, then it can only be repaired by the device manufacturer. Please contact the device manufacturer for information on the repair procedure.
2. If you bought the device separately from a shop, then guarantee claims can only be made with the shop which sold you the drive. The contents of the guarantee comply with the legal regulations in the country, in which the product was purchased.

Toshiba does NOT provide a direct repair service for anyone other than our direct customers. It is not possible to make claims directly to Toshiba in cases of possible defects. Therefore you should NEVER send a defective drive to Toshiba representatives, because they cannot process this type of transaction!

In most cases, you will receive a different drive to the one you sent for repair in order to speed up the exchange process and reduce your waiting time. The exchanged product can be a new or a repaired drive.

It is Toshibas policy to ensure a maximum level of data security. Therefore all data on any HDD will be securely erased as the first step of the repair process. This ensures that nobody is able to misuse any of the data stored on your drive.
Toshiba does not provide any data recovery service. If you are in urgent need of the data on your defective HDD, please contact specialized data recovery companies like Ontrack, Convar, Vogon or others BEFORE sending the drive for repair.

-> Toshiba warranty info

Solid State Drives (SSD's) are based around the use of semiconductor NAND flash memory technology (a non-volatile storage technology that does not require power to retain data) and are commonly available in the same form factor, interface style and capacity point as the traditional mechanical rotating (spindle based) drives normally referred to as hard disk drives (HDDs).

Because a SSD has no mechanical moving parts, the performance of the device is restricted only by the electrical characteristics and the time to access the addressed data. This in turn is governed by the design overheads of the device and it’s addressing/mapping algorithms to the NAND memory. In contrast, data access performance in a HDD is determined by the quickness of movement of electromechanical components to position a read/write head over a defined area on a rotating disk. In addition, with an SSD having no moving parts, this enhances the ruggedtivity and tolerance to external environmental forces such as vibration/shock.

There is a definite market opportunity for the performance and reliability advantages of SSDs. However, we expect SSDs to coexist with HDDs for the future because there is a role for both storage technologies depending on the application environment and expectations. The SSD is seen as a HDD but much faster, providing a fantastic IOPS (Input/output Operations Per Second) performance in comparison. It effectively emulates a HDD in terms of it’s responses and provides the same or greater specification interface to the host bus adaptor (HBA). In terms of error reporting the construct of a SSD differs to that of a HDD, and certain features and error processing will become redundant. But where possible, compatible error codes are emulated to maintain alignment with existing software tooling and support services. Furthermore, certain commands favor the design of the HDD as opposed to a SSD, so either these commands are rejected where not applicable or an emulated response is provided to satisfy device drivers and management software to avoid unnecessary system error logging where the OS does not reflect support for current device types. Current interface data rates of 6Gbps can be found on both SAS and SATA options.

In the end, Toshiba sees HDD and SSDs as critical storage solutions with long term viability and attributes specific to different applications.

HDD longevity is determined by the wear of the mechanical components and it’s ability to maintain the highly accurate control associated with intricate movement. This can also be directly linked with the operational environment a HDD is expected to perform within, and this influence can act as an accelerator to drive degradation over time. The actual field life of a HDD can easily surpass it’s warranty period if the drive is installed and used in accordance with the manufacturers design specifications and is independent of the number of write/read operations. Conversely, SSD technology does place a restriction on the number of write/erase cycles applied to each memory cell as these degrade over time and use. SSD specifications generally state a maximum number of full drive capacity overwrites/refreshes over the service life of the product (Petabytes). This wear rate (write endurance) is a function that can be predicted and accurately calculated and the management of cell life and the re-assignment of data is a core technology to the enterprise SSD.

Generally, the form factor of a SSD is designed to duplicate or enhance those offered by a HDD. This is for pure compatibility reasons where the design specification of PC, array or server chassis dictates certain z-height maximums (x = width, y=length). This also applies to indirect mounting using a tray or hot-swap drive carrier. Currently, SSD model designs offer 25mm, 15mm, 9.5 and 7mm z-height in 3.5 inch and 2.5 inch FF options to maintain direct HDD interchangeability.

SSD can be applied to the same design applications as those currently involving HDD. Where SSD are used as replacement devices for existing HDD installations to achieve improved performance, care should be taken to ensure that no system bottlenecks are likely to impede the expected performance increase due to legacy specification restrictions. Mixing HDD and SSD as RAID elements is unlikely to achieve the positive technology performance enhancements associated with SSD, as the RAID controller and drive command completion times will be driven by the slowest element. In this case, if the application involves striping data, the HDD element will be the controlling factor on overall performance.

The price of semiconductor NAND flash will reduce as demand ramps up and the move from HDD technology accelerates. Currently, approximate market average ratio of $10 per GB for Enterprise SSD (eSSD) against 50C per GB for Enterprise HDD. The $ per GB costing changes yet again when we draw comparisons with Client SSD (cSSD), NearLine (NL) HDD, Desktop HDD and Mobile HDD. Different market sectors and application environments command cost structuring to disseminate between drive technologies.

Single Level Cell semiconductor NAND lists performance and memory cell longevity as positive design features, whereas capacity range and price are generally regarded as the negative gating factors.

Multi-Level Cell semiconductor NAND lists capacity range (2 to 3 x SLC maximum) and price ($ per GB) as the positive design features, whereas memory cell longevity and performance are generally regarded as negative gating factors.

Client SDD is used as fast boot devices (bootstrap) for Server OS applications which will contain basic elements of the main operating system environment to allow a faster system response time to a network or fail-over cluster environment. The bootstrap is then coupled to the main bulk of the OS residing on HDD to complete the load. The more widespread application environment for this technology is for mobile computing devices and industrial environments where environmental tolerance is essential.

With the cost of Enterprise SSD (eSSD) still commanding a premium price, applications for this technology is growing but still niche in the number of applications which make the performance vs. cost and combining enterprise data reliability/integrity a prerequisite. In the enterprise sector, eSSD forms the pinnacle of performance storage and as such is regarded as Tier0 within the tiered storage system model. Extreme performance within transactional processing environments may drive the use of RAIDED eSSD, but this is still the exception rather than the norm. More commonly an eSSD device is used as a cache accelerator element fronting a storage array under the control of advanced file system and storage managers to provide an uplift in overall HDD based array storage performance.

You are probably using a 32-Bit host PC. Systems with a LBA length of 32 Bit only support storage capacities up to 2.2 TBytes.
Please refer to our related white paper for more detailed information (multiple languages available).

You can very easily get the drive’s age from its serial number "S/N abcdefghi jkl". In this serial number, "a" is the production month (1=January...9=September, X=October, Y=November, Z=December) and "b" the last digit of the year.
For example: "S/N X5SO9163T 354" was produced in October 2005 ("X5").

In most cases, rattling noises are normal and are no reason to worry. They are caused by mechanical parts of the HDD and just indicate that the drive is reading, writing or calibrating itself. Even if the drive is not being actively written to or read from, most operating systems do a lot of accesses to the system disk in the background. So if there is no additional indication for a defect, just the noise alone does not indicate that the drive is faulty.

1. For using a PC-Card drive under Windows NT 4 or DOS you need to buy an additional software that enables the PCMCIA port, such as Cardware or Cardwizard (see e.g. https://www.systemsoft.com/ )
    
2. Apart from the 2 GB version of this drive (which is FAT16 preformatted) the Toshiba PC-Card HDD is preformatted with FAT32 file system. Because this file system is not implemented in Windows NT 4 or DOS you need to change it to FAT16 (DOS/NT) or NTFS (NT) before you can use the drive. The maximum size of one FAT16 partition is limited to 2 GB. If you have a drive that is larger than 2 GB (e.g. MK5002MPL) you need to split it into multiple partition with maximum size of 2 GB each, otherwise you will not be able to format it with FAT16 file system!

This question can only be answered by your notebook manufacturer! The physical dimensions and connectors have not changed within famillies of HDDs (e.g. all 2.5” PATA-drives, all 2.5” SATA drives or all Toshiba 1.8” drives) during the past years, but there are a lot of parameters (like power consumption, heat, …) that could differ. Also, older BIOS versions may have difficulties recognizing modern HDDs which exceed a certain storage capacity. So please contact your notebook manufacturer or certified dealer for information on which HDDs can be used in your notebook.

One reason may be that your computer is using an old BIOS that is not able to deal with drives exceeding a certain capacity, so it can only address a part of the drive.
If this is not the reason but the usable size is just a bit smaller than expected, this issue is probably due to different ways of calculating the size, either using the decimal or a binary system:
In a decimal system 1 GB = 1,000 MB = 1,000,000 KB = 1,000,000,000 Byte
But most operating systems calculate with factor 1024 instead of 1000: 1GB=1024MB=1024x1024KB= 1,073,741,824 Byte. Because of this, all drives seem to be around 1.074 times smaller under the operating system than they really are.

For example: An 80GB drive can store 80,000,000,000 bytes, but the operating system divides this number by 1.074 and therefore shows the drive as having a capacity of 74.5GB only. But this does NOT mean that you loose 5.5GB. It is still the same number of bytes that can physically be stored in both ways of calculating!

Windows 2000 and Windows XP do not contain any drivers for SATA controllers.You will have to get the correct drives from the manufacturer of your SATA controller and copy them onto a floppy disc or CD. When installing Windows 200 or Windows XP you must install these drivers by pressing F6 at the beginning of the OS installation. Please note that this is not a hard disk drive issue, but a controller issue, so please contact the manufacturer of the controller (or in most cases of your notebook).

Toshiba doesn't have a license to bundle any Disk Manager or diagnostic software with the HDD at the time of supply.
We also do not distribute this software as a separate item.

If you are interested in a Disk Manager, please contact software distributors which offer them directly, e.g.: OnTrack (www.ontrack.com)

Please contact the following company:

Adapter-King
www.adapter-king.de
Telephone: +49 (0) 2833 - 573 446

As a business customer, you could also contact the manufacturer directly:
ES&S Oliver Reiners
www.esskabel.de
Telephone: +49 (0) 2162 - 266 18 0

For technical support please refer to the following web-page: https://www.amacom-tech.com.