Vista Kills Toshiba laptops!

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 2240 Location: Central FL, USA

I called on an old friend/customer today to find out that the New Toshiba laptop I installed for him last summer has had two hard drive replacements since then. It runs Vista Home.

He was told first by a technician at Toshiba Service Center and later by another tech that there is something in Vista that's killing the Toshiba laptop hard drives.

A solution to this would be nice, but mainly I'm asking all yous tech's out there if you've seen or heard of this phenominon?

Any authoritative info would be appreciated.

Thanks,
the Doctor

Baby_Tux · Joined: Mar 06, 2007 Posts: 1242

Haven't heard this one so...

Would like to know this myself as the only thing that I know of, software wise, that would trash a HD is rattling the heads. (mainly trying to run them past the stops)

goretsky

Hello,

Any hard disk drive manufactured in the past ten years or so should be able to handle an attempt to knock it out of alignment by moving the heads to the landing zone. Modern hard disk drives also have features such as self-calibration and the ability to remap bad sectors, which, coupled with a much higher MTBF, should make them much more reliable.

I have heard of hard disk drives failing en masse due to various reasons (wrong read-write heads used, bad controller chip on circuit board, wrong formulation for thin film media coating on the platters, incorrect formulation of lubricant in the spindle motor, bad bearings and so forth) but the only kind of software damage I can think of in recent memory is that resulting from a bad BIOS flash.

Perhaps there is a power management or thermal sensor problem which is causing an overheat situation that leads to premature disk failure?

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

louis-the-cat · Joined: May 13, 2006 Posts: 307

my wife has a toshiba laptop which came with vista home preinstalled.
she's had it about 6 months, and so far ( touch wood) no probs.

I'd like to keep an eye on this thread though in case anyone does identify a possible problem.

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 2240 Location: Central FL, USA

Well, that's sort of been my own experience too.
I've been recommending Toshiba laptops for years and I've seen none that have had excessive hard drive problems. No more than any other brand.

The suggestion was that there is something built into Vista that's causing the drives to fail. What that could be, I have no idea. Question

It would have to be something that would cause the drives to "THRASH" until they just quit working.
I've heard of Norton causing drive thrashing, but NONE of my customers uses Norton,,,,, not if I can help it anyway.

Believe me, I'll be watching those Toshiba laptops very close for excessive drive activity.
And I'll be contacting the Toshiba factory service center here in FL for any info they might have on this topic.

If there's a legitimate problem, then I can probably come up with a workable solution to it. Only time will tell.

Thanks Mates!
The Doctor