Toshiba Canvio Basics A3

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 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.

Failed within first week – Didn't even last a week - used in a desktop environment - Locked up my computer and reported that it had an I/O problem - 4 hours of running a disk error checking program and it was stuck on the last 20% of drive - an expensive paperweight