Dennis Rice reports that his Toshiba M200’s drive has failed. My M200’s drive was on its last legs a few months back. At the time I surfed around and was surprised to see others that had reported the same problem. I’ve heard of several others since then. Sorry to hear the Dennis is going through the same problem. It’s a pain.
At a recent hardware event I talked with a drive manufacturer and mentioned that I’d seen more drive failures in recent years–especially in notebooks and Tablet PCs. He wasn’t surprised. He said that the notebook companies are still learning. For instance, he mentioned that we’ll be seeing more clever fixturing techniques to hold the drives more like a glove than fixed in place. And as drives get smaller, we’ll continue to see reliability go up too.
I noticed my new Toshiba M400, for instance, doesn’t mount the hard drive directly to the frame of the Tablet PC. Instead it sits in a rubbery frame. I’m assuming Toshiba does this to mitigate vibration transfer to the drive. I wonder how much of a difference this will make in the average life expectancy of the hard drive? Will it add another year? Or a couple months? Or will it solve the problem? Anyone know?
Yep, you are right Loren, it is a pain, but is still the inevitable fact of using technology with fallable parts. Having to get repairs is a fact of life, but how those are handled is where a major issue comes into play, it’s called “Customer Service”. I did want to point you to my blog entry today about a satisfactory repair experience with Toshiba:
http://www.gottabemobile.com/MyM200IsOnIt8217sWayBackCouldItBeTrue.aspx
I hope I am not pulling the happy trigger too soon here, but really felt motivated to praise Toshiba for this result!