Toshiba brand of laptop 2.5″ media are often used by laptop and notebook manufacturers in their builds and make a very reliable form of data storage with decent performance in read and write tests.
Excessive heat within the laptop may cause issues with the disk surface or magnetic coating this will first exhibit itself as degraded media and many bad sectors appearing, perhaps the operating system will attempt to repair or mark as bad these sectors.
Another form of failure may be caused by a back EMF electro motive force, an excessive or wrong power supply which may cause an over voltage, ofcourse the hard drive has rudimentary protection in the form of a fue(s) or a TVS transient voltage suppressor, however they have a limited use and may allow excess currents to enter into the disk enclosure and damage the HSA head stack assembly, thus causing the clicking or strange noise heard from the hard drive.
In 0ver 90% of cases a noisy Toshiba laptop hard drive can be located to a failed HSA and will require the intervention of a clean room and skilled engineers to resolve the issues, it will most likely not be the PCB as some users may attempt to change without success.
The MCU on the PCB together with the firmware will allow the hard disk to spin up and then when it has reached the correct speed will release the HSA to seek out the servo wedges and tracks, if this can not be located in x time it will shutdown the hard drive to stop any further damage to the disk surface or disk.
Locating and matching the Toshiba HSA is not straight forward as the manufacture will not simply sell this component, it requires the location of the same model and head stack assembly and date match, this requires determined effort by trained and dedicated people and good contacts worldwide to supply the correct replacement HDD.
Replacing the HSA in no clean room conditions and without correct ESD precautions will destroy the good HSA and compromise or destroy any possible data on your failed hard drive as the HSA literally files over the platters using Bernoulli effect at less than 1 micron, dust and fingerprints represent massive obstacles for the HSA to deal with and thus will destroy it and further degrade and damage the disk surface further.
A head crash can occur when the HSA comes into direct contact with the disk surface at a place and time it should not, vertical damage like a dropped laptop , particularly when it is on can cause massive damage as it has less than 1 micron distance to impact into the platter, if this happens do not switch your laptop back on it will further damage it.
Some of the range within the Toshiba hard drive disks are;
MK GAS, MK MAT, MK GAT this is not a definitive list.
In the right hands and with the right tools Toshiba data recovery to 2.5″ media very often is a success so do not despair if you lose your important and precious data.
