Toshiba Hard Drives Suck

walla complex hawalli

I heard a lot of bad stuff about Toshiba hard drives yet somehow I ended up buying one. Back in February Nataly needed a larger drive for her MacBook and I ended up going to Red Star in Walla Complex in Hawalli to see what they had available. I usually buy my stuff from Red Star or SoftIsland across the street since they both usually give me the best prices. The largest drive they had in my budget was the 160GB Toshiba. I didn’t want to get it but the salesman there convinced me that unlike the old Toshiba drives that were made in China and were prone to failure, the new drives are now made in Philippines and were supposedly of much better quality. I bought into that and went ahead and purchased the drive.

Just before we sold her MacBook the drive ended up dying. Luckily she had everything backed up on her old drive and so was able to recover her work but the Toshiba drive was dead. I put it aside and forgot about it until a few days ago I accidentally found the original invoice. There in very clear hand writing it stated “6 months warranty”. I checked the date and realized it had only been 5 months since I bought the drive so I headed to Hawalli today and got the drive replaced. I wasn’t to sure if they would replace it for me or not since most of the places there are pretty shabby but Red Star were pretty cool and after testing it out told me I could come back tomorrow and get a replacement. Since I didn’t want to come back the next day and since I also didn’t want another Toshiba drive I ended up settling on a 120GB Seagate and a nice discount on a decent HDMI cable.

I just installed the drive in my PS3 and its working perfectly. I will never buy another Toshiba drive ever again and I would not recommend them to anyone. They are cheap which makes them tempting but you really should stay away from them.

Jul 7, 2008

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19 Comments, add your own...

1. Sekhar | July 7th, 2008 at 8:22 pm

Hi Mark, Not all Toshiba hard drives fail. I am using one (120GB) for more than 2 years and it’s doing perfectly well. I always use “safely remove hardware” option before disconnecting it. May be it’s the reason, still healthy !!
2. lfc-q8 | July 7th, 2008 at 9:07 pm

ps3?
3. Pure | July 7th, 2008 at 9:43 pm

thanks for the tip ; )
4. falconpunch | July 7th, 2008 at 11:01 pm

you would think mark would make a post about his new ps3 =/
5. Mark | July 7th, 2008 at 11:04 pm

lol ok a quick summary, I now have an Xbox 360, Wii and PS3.
Xbox 360 for all my regular gaming.
Wii for the virtual console.
PS3 for MGS and GranTurismo and whatever other cool Sony only game.

Plus Nintendo DS Lite and PSP so its a full house.
6. Pure | July 7th, 2008 at 11:18 pm

lol Mark, i guess u’ll be fighting with ur future kids over the game consuls ; p
7. lensman | July 7th, 2008 at 11:24 pm

I agree, softisland gives me good deals too…

I dunno about toshiba hdd’s but I’ve seen Maxtor hdd’s(especially the terrabyte hdds) crashing like crazy. I use Western Digital and I think they are the best. I’ve been using them forever, even as a raid array and they work perfect.
8. Q80Warlock | July 7th, 2008 at 11:34 pm

I’ve got 2 that are 4 years old and nothing happened to them. One 80 the other 120GB. The problem with Hawalli is that you don’t even know the source of all their hardware are they genuine or not, most of the stuff are also stored very badly which would result in an early hardware failure.

I would go for Hitachi/WD HardDisks, but I know that Hawalli is so cheap-assed that they’ll just ignore these brands.
9. Gollum | July 8th, 2008 at 1:18 am

please tell me you didnt leave the dead drive
10. TanGo | July 8th, 2008 at 5:31 am

Now you get me worried about my 3 Toshiba MHDs which I’ve been using for the past couple of years,
and which ARE nade in China – better go replace them! Today..
11. Moe | July 8th, 2008 at 9:04 am

i changed my X Laptop hard drive with toshiba and YEAH IT SUCKS bad sectors came up in 3 MONTH :S
12. VirusX | July 8th, 2008 at 10:03 am

Western Digital is my choice since 9 years
with all the heavy work on my PC 24/7 they’re still like i just bought them!
No bad clusters, no power failure, no noise
I’ve now 320GB, 250GB, 160GB and i’m intending to buy the 1TB (WD10EACS) or (WD1000FYPS if found), this month cuz 160GB is going to be retired! :)
SIMPLY.. WD IS PERFECT!
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/productcatalog.asp?t=1
13. Khaled | July 8th, 2008 at 11:22 am

I prefer Hitachi 2.5″ drives, they are the first to make 7500 RPM 2.5″ drives as well, excellent for operating systems…
14. Moe | July 8th, 2008 at 12:29 pm

TanGo :

Me 2, I don’t know why i told the guy yeah sure put a toshiba (very good laptops).. WD rocks!
15. Hadi | July 9th, 2008 at 2:24 pm

I guess the problem is with the hard drive case interface, i had similar problem with my 80GB toshiba hard drive, it died on my suddenly and went google the problem but no luck, so I thugh what if I change the hard drive case? did so and my hard drive is alive again
16. fadi hussein | July 10th, 2008 at 3:02 pm

Im pro Western Digital too! Reasonably priced, great slick design, noise-less and guaranteed satisfaction! I think i should get a commission for what i have just said;p
17. orgthingy | July 13th, 2008 at 2:41 pm

Well, Toshiba HD *do* suck when it comes to music and videos! But it’s perfect for Word documents, pictures..etc
18. jessica | April 29th, 2009 at 5:21 am

I bought a toshiba a year ago this month. It worked great untill month 4, then it would boot up, but the screen would not turn on. Now like i said this month will be one year i took very very good care of this comp beacuse i thought it would last at least 4 years for me, but i was wrong, the hard drive has failed after only a year my warrenty ran out about oh 20 days ago. This is not ok, when i spend 1500$ on a product i expect more then a year out of it, i could have bought a shit used car for this much. I called them, they were happy to help for the low price of $49.95, and i also called micro when i thought it was a op system and they also told me to F*** off. I will do everything i can to keep people from wasting money on this crap, i am more the upset about this, and will be ever more upset once i find out how much it will be to fix…..horrible go with a cheap 400$ comp from walmart before toshiba
19. brent | November 15th, 2009 at 12:28 am

I would certainly agree to this. My toshiba 250 GB just died on me a month after I bought it! And the bad thing is, they dont want to replace because they says they dont replace accesorries.TOSHIBA SUCKS!!!

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