Toshiba 3005-S304 (or other) laptop owners?

[Jeriko]

I'm planning on picking up a Toshiba 3005-S304 at CompUSA tomorrow. But I have a question specifically for Toshiba owners. Is there some sort of hard drive problem with these machines? I've read a couple reports of loud clicking noises causing people to return Toshibas for replacements, or sending them back to the company for a hard drive replacement. Can anyone here speak to this?

And are there any Presario 1720US owners? I'd like some opinions on it as well. It uses a Radeon instead of the GeForce2Go, but I don't think that matters too much on a laptop. Otherwise, its specs are pretty much identical to the Toshiba, and it's a hell of a lot thinner.

-J

 

[badga]

Jeriko, I have a 3000-353 which is roughly the same system. Within a month of getting the PC the HDD started to make some awful clicking sounds. I finally ordered a replacement drive two days before it finally failed. I came across a few people that had similar problems with the drives when surfing the forums, but it didn't seem too pervasive at the time. The 20GB unit in my laptop was a 9mm Fujitsu MHM2200AT which i replaced for about $100 (same unit). I was told by Toshiba support that Toshiba will use whatever spec unit they can source at the time of production, it is not necessarily the fujitsu unit. BTW in the 3.5 months of using this new drive it has had no problems.

I do notice a low clicking sound that is simply the sound of normal operations that is louder than my older thinkpad but i think that is a reflection of the tosh not being as well made (sound dampening) as the ibm was. You get used to that sound. Don't know if what you have read about is the bad clicking or the normal clicking.

If you haven't yet, check out the on-line support forums on the Tosh support site (see below). Like most manufacturers, if you don't get the expensive support option you are stuck with fending for yourself. The cost of that is an important consideration when buying a laptop

Otherwise, the tosh is a pretty good unit considering the price, as noted, not the construction quality of a IBM but pretty good and tons of features. I certainly don't regret getting it.

Thanks for bringing the issue up, I forgot about sending in the dead drive for warranty service until you just reminded me!.

Good luck Badga
tosh support link

 

[Jeriko]

Glad to remind you. 🙂

Funny you should mention the brand of HD in your notebook was a Fujitsu. It seemed like the reports I saw of this problem were mostly the result of Hitachi hard drives. Regardless, it doesn't seem to be a very widespread problem. What does appear to be a problem with whatever HD they give you is that it will be slow.

Every notebook I find that isn't vastly overpriced has at least one weak link inside. Of course, the are only about five affordable 1GHz notebooks with GeForce2Go or Radeon video chips inside.

-J