X41 drive park noise

[blurglegurble]

Last fall I purchased a new Haitachi HTC426030G7AT00 drive for a salvage X41 tablet I had aquired. However, I soon discovered the continuous "click-THUNK" noise of the drive parking it's heads while idle (confirmed by SMART load/unload count). By that point the drive was out of the seller's return period, so thus I went to the task of researching the issue. In the end, no firmware/driver updates to the X41 or drive itself, nor the hdparm -255 or -254 commands, had any effect on the noise. As far as the hdd firmware updates go, I tried several different versions and alterations to the configuration files but the update always failed. I suspect the reason for the failure is that the drive I have differs in some small way from the drives the X41 was originally configured with.

My brother is now in need of a tablet pc and so I am trying once again to fix the drive issue. I will attempt to retrace my troubleshooting attempts to post additional info here soon (and hopefully find some critical bit I overlooked). In the meantime, any thoughts or info from this forum would be greatly appreciated. Mostly I am looking for a confirmation that I should give up on this drive, since I tend to be a bit stubborn. Thanks!

[loyukfai]

Does it sound like this...?

http://byfai.com/content/x41-tablet-weird-hdd-noise

If so, you may check out this page...

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=15769

IIRC, there's no way to fix it but to have it replaced.

Cheers.

[Tasurinchi]

Even if you get an Hitachi in good shape, they're old enough and they'll probably bite the dust more sooner than later. I'd start looking for a ZIF hard drive or SSD depending on your budget.