Review on Toshiba X300 4TB Performance & Gaming 3.5-Inch Internal Hard Drive - CMR SATA 6.0 GB/s 7200 RPM 128 MB Cache - HDWE140XZSTA by Samantha Adams

I will never buy from Toshiba again if I can. I bought the X300 4TB and it seemed to work at first. However, after less than 2 months it started to run very slowly and eventually had reading and writing problems. In the end it degraded to a complete failure. After much troubleshooting, it turned out that the hard drive had a lot of bad sectors. Then came the RMA process, which I'm still struggling with. After initially using Toshiba's surprisingly inconvenient website, I started an RMA. They told me they would send me a new hard drive and that once I received it I had 10 days to return the defective one or I would be billed. Sounds fair to me and it gave me time to try cloning an old hard drive to maybe keep some data. However, the next day their tech support, someone named Joshua Chancellor, sends me an oddly cryptic email saying they need proof of purchase and that because it's a hard drive I need to send in the defective hard drive first. It actually took a few email exchanges to sort this out due to poor communication. Likewise. They don't send me a new hard drive, they just send me a Visa card and only after I send in the defective hard drive for inspection. Also, I have to pay and handle the shipping myself, and if I want to clone a drive, I have to buy a new one myself first. I understand that Joshua doesn't make those rules, even though he wasn't good at communicating all of this. Toshiba has very poor customer service and policies. It now costs me money to clone a hard drive and send it back if it's their fault that the product is defective. Now I need to find a way to try and recover my data before I send it. My best advice is don't buy this hard drive and stay away from Toshiba because if you receive a defective product it will cost you in the end. I will definitely not buy from Toshiba again.