Question Toshiba External HDD becomes unresponsive with 100% usage, is this normal for new drives ?

[SilverChad]

Hi, I got a brand new Toshiba 4TB External HDD. Speed and everything is fine, but when I'm using the drive consistently It suddenly goes in to a comatose state. It becomes unresponsive and causes the entire explorer and operating system to break. S.M.A.R.T checks and CHKDSK checks are fine.

For example when I launch a Virtual Machine with a small 5GB Linux from the drive after 30 minutes it happens and it freeze, Task manager shows high response time and 100% usage but nothing is being used.

Issue only gets fixed with a hard restart (using PC button) or putting system in sleep and disconnect the drive and wake it up again or... Disconnect without sleep.

Similar Case
Now here is a backstory on my other drive which ironically had same issue. 2 years ago I got a 4TB Western Digital Internal HDD and it had the very same issue, Even worst in some ways. It was going in same state while it was not even being used. I sent it back to guarantee service and they rejected and said all tests passed and drive has no issues. So I kept the drive and after I installed some games and it filled up to 300 400 GB issue went away and freeze never happened again. Even playing Cyberpunk 2077 and Apex Legends for hours doesn't lead to a freeze.

- Is this behavior normal for drives with high capacity? Note that my 4TB Toshiba is now 600GB filled but still has the freezing issue.
- Should I be worried? I did all health checkups even with drive official software and no issue appears.

Thanks for your help!

 

[evermorex76]

The drive is failing. Return it. Fight with them if they refuse. (If you just got it, and from a retailer, it should not be hard. If you have to RMA with Toshiba, it might be harder, or they might be easy about it.) When a drive is failing, it has to retry access to sectors over and over, resulting in 100% usage. With a USB drive it will be different because you're using it through a USB controller which "abstracts" the functionality from the OS and hardware somewhat. When it's internal, the system is constantly accessing it to some degree and it's direct, so the performance of the whole OS is constantly affected. But either way, because the OS is trying to read or write data, it's waiting for the drive to respond and seems to freeze up. I've replaced dozens of drives for this reason.

 

[Ralston18]

Update your post to include full system hardware specs and OS information.

PSU: make, model, wattage, age, condition (original to build, new, used, refurbished)?

Disk drive(s): make, model, capacity, how full, how connected for all drives.

Toshiba drive: Model, How is it powered?

In Windows:

Look in Reliability History/Monitor and Event Viewer for any error codes, warnings, or even informational events being logged just before or at the time the external HDD becomes non-responsive.

More information needed.