Hitachi 7K100 Seek Noise Just Got Louder: Drive Going Bad??

[JHaislet]

I've had a Hitachi 7K100 100GB 2.5" IDE drive in my T43 for almost a year now, and just this morning, seeks on the hdd have become noticeably louder. They also have a slightly more mechanical/rough sound to them. I've already backed up my data as this appears like the drive might be going bad.

Are there any SMART tools that work with the Hitachi drives? I know Seagate has some awesome diagnostic tools, but I'm not finding much on Hitachi's site.

[GomJabbar]

Hitachi Drive Fitness Test

Includes Utilities
* Drive information.
* SMART operations for supported hard disk drives.

[bin.dong]

I do have the same problem on my T43. I did hardware test, nothing wrong with it. It's working properly but noise.

Oh, forget to mention that this happened after I did the hardware firmware update.

[richk]

Some drives are noisier than others, but change is never good. Make sure you always have a current backup.

[JHaislet]

I did the firmware update for the HDD in ~Oct '06 and haven't messed with anything since, thus my concern.

I also ran a couple of different diagnostic & SMART programs and neither found any errors/problems. This morning I went ahead and ordered another 100GB 7K100 to have as a standby.

Luckily, I've always been quite the stickler for data backup and have a multi-destination script for RoboCopy that runs each evening, thus data loss isn't a concern, but the downtime could be problematic.

Has anyone had any experience cloning a HDD in a T43 with both the Trusted Platform Module & IBM's Client Security Solution (drive encryption) enabled? I went ahead & picked up an Ultrabay 2nd HDD adapter for the T43, so maybe that will get me past any issues that might have arisen using an external USB enclosure.