IBM ThinkPad ESDI drive mortality

[Al Kossow]

Has anyone ever looked at the original ThinkPad 700 series drives (80,120,160mb)?
A friend is looking at doing a SSD replacement and we had a hell of
a time finding working ones.
Guessing they were built by Toshiba, the Travelstar IDE were done in the UK

 

[NeXT]

2.5" ESDI was a thing??

EWWWWWW!

Did the PS/ Note (N33SX) systems use the same drive? I think I have a 40mb in storage. It worked last I used it...20 years ago.
Edited: Nevermind. A quick search says no.

 

[ardent-blue]

2.5" ESDI was a thing??

9552 HD Upgrade Kits Yes, Virginia, there was a DBA-ESDI to IDE upgrade.

 

[NeXT]

That is quite horrific.

 

[Al Kossow]

Well the specific question was why so many of the drives are dead today.
I posted here because I know there are people on here that do (did?) drive repair.

There is also no need to post uninformed speculation for the root cause.
It's OK to not say anything if you don't know

 

[ardent-blue]

I never noticed a flood of dead ThinkPad 700/720 DBA-ESDI drives. Earlier ESDI and DBA-ESDI drives sometimes suffered from stiction.

"we had a hell of a time finding working ones"

Well, the 700/720 ThinkPads were the only systems to use the 2.5" DBA-ESDI drives. Are the 700/720 ThinkPads common? Akin to the 55SX or 8530 systems in number?

"why so many of the drives are dead today"

How many dead DBA-ESDI drives have you found? What was the failure? Components like caps? Throw us a bone...

 

[Al Kossow]

drive not doing recal. motor speed going crazy.
as you noted, they are not common drives. 3 of 5 we've found have been bad.