Toshiba Hard Drive Data Recovery

Probably the most unique feature of Toshiba hard drives is the fact that all of the drive specific code necessary for the operation of the drive is stored within configuration pages stored in a ROM chip on the PCB.  This is different from most drives such as Western Digital, Seagate, and Hitachi who all use a service area stored on the hard drive platters.This design has both some advantages as well as disadvantages.  One advantage is that it isn’t prone to bad sectors affecting the service area and necessitating firmware repairs for data recovery.  However the obvious drawback in the design is that if the PCB board is badly enough damaged, or lost by a customer attempting their own data recovery, the data can actually become unrecoverable.  However it also makes the drives particularly easy to work on for recovery technicians.  Knowing that the firmware isn’t corrupted by bad sectors is one less issue to have to diagnose and makes it very quick to determine if the read write heads require replacement.

In years past one common issue with Toshiba laptop hard drives was a bad bearing grease that was used.  This grease would harden over time and eventually seize the motor.  This often necessitated labs to perform platter swaps, which have a particularly low success rate for drives with multiple platters.  Fortunately we came up with our own in house solution to re-lubricate the bearings without having to move the platters to another enclosure.Today those bearing issues seem to be a thing of the past, and Toshiba drives are among the most reliable on the market.  Plus they are actually more affordable than other brands likely a result of the bad press they received from their previous reliability issues.  Today they are a top choice of ours for 2.5″ drives.

In recent years Toshiba has followed suit with companies like Western Digital in building the USB interface directly onto their external lineup of hard drives.  Though they haven’t incorporated encryption yet, fortunately.  This creates an issue when trying to recover data from a struggling drive with bad sectors as the USB interface connected to a typical Windows system is very limited.Fortunately DeepSpar Data Recovery has come up with a solution for this issue in their DeepSpar Disk Imager 4 USB addon.  It allow full functionality of the SCSI command set over the USB interface making possible the selective imaging at a single sector level just as can be accomplished through the SATA interface normally.

Just like all other laptop and external hard drives Toshiba drives commonly suffer from the following failures:

• Failed Read/Write Heads
• Failed PCB Due to Power Issues
• Read/Write Heads Stuck to Platters

Data Medics in Cranston, RI is a professional data recovery laboratory with the tools and expertise to successfully recover your critical data from a failed Toshiba laptop or external hard drive.  Offering free evaluation to see if the data can be recovered, and a guarantee that if we can’t get the data back there’s no labor charge.  Visit the Contact page above to find out more.