Booting a Toshiba Laptop

I am checking out a Toshiba Satellite A655 laptop.  I have no problems booting a USB memstick for Freebsd 14.1.  However, it appears the internal drive has some issues.  It writes zeros just fine over the entire disk.  It errors quickly when writing random data.  So the question is if the problem is the drive or interface chips.  I tried to build an external drive with the memstick but it will not boot however I format it.  The memstick is GPT with both a MBR boot and UFE boot.  I have tried every combination I can think of and none of them work on an external spinner.  How should the drive be formatted to boot?

-- Doug