Best Toshiba Portable / External Hard Drives

First And Last – I've owned 2 Toshiba laptops in the past and thought they were rock solid. While I'd normally gravitate towards Seagate drives, I couldn't go past… Read more

these 2TB drives at under $100. They were cheaper than their Seagate competitor drives so I thought I'd give one a whirl. Plugged it in and everything seemed to be running well and as expected. However, after copying over movie files and taking them to the living room TV to plug it in, the cord accidentally fell out of my hand and the drive crashed onto the TV unit. Not a great fall by any means. I've had Seagate drives bounce off the floor numerous times and still worked. This guy on the other hand just clicked when plugged back in. Not much you can do except throw it away and get a new one. I guess you get what you pay for. I didn't even take it apart, but I'd so there's bugger all vibration cushioning in the case All up, I only had it for a week and wasn't real impressed that it couldn't take a little bump. So that will be the first and last Toshiba drive for me.

THREE different drives caused catastrophic error, requiring recovery - FOUR times! – Avoid this if you value your data. CANVIO ADVANCED too?: This may also apply to the more expensive Canvio ADVANCED range, because when I looked up… Read more

the serial number (MQ04UBD200) of these drives via CrystalDisk Info, that is what came up. (In other words, they could be the same drive INTERNALLY despite what you think you are buying). But I know I bought the Basics model because I have the receipts for all three.

Over the last year, four times the drives became UNREADABLE. This happened on three DIFFERENT drives (one drive it happened TWICE!)

The Master File Table (MFT) became corrupted.

I had to use TESTDISK (free) to recover the MFT three times.

The other time, there wasn't even a backed up MFT and I had to recover my MOST IMPORTANT DRIVE file-by-file (using the excellent File Scavenger). It took me WEEKS to make sure I had everything and I'm still not sure.

All of these times except the latest did NOT involve a loss of power. (And that includes the worst one just mentioned).

It just suddenly gave the infamous error: ""Delayed Write Failed : Windows was unable to save all the data for the file X:\$Mft. The data has been lost. This error may be caused by a failure of your computer hardware or network connection. Please try to save this file elsewhere.”

Next thing: the drive either disappears from Explorer completely, or when you open it, all you see is the recycle bin and none of your files are there.

I'm really disgusted about this and will never buy Toshiba again. I hope for the day a trustworthy company makes large SSDs.