Western Digital WDAL2540 540MB (1996) - Hard Drive Sounds

Prior to stumbling across this drive, I had no clue WD made 2.5" drives in 1996. Sadly, this unit has a lot of problems, the biggest being that it has beyond savable stiction. 99% of the time, it requires a loving tap with the end of a screwdriver (the rubber side, don't worry!) to get it going. You can hear that quite obviously when I start it up with the IBM Aptiva I use for testing.
The first spin-up in this video was the first time I've ever seen it start without requiring a tap. It had been on for several hours at this point which may have helped, but it got stuck immediately after again.

I harvested this unit completely by chance. I purchased a Toshiba DynaBook SS475 from Japan in May of 2023, mostly because the machine looked really fun & it was only 500 yen surprisingly (although, it requires a lot of work). The machine refused to boot when I powered it on, which is fairly common for many of Toshiba's laptop from the period if they have no/a non-functional hard drive installed, which in this case just sounded like bad stiction. I opened it up to take a look thinking "it'll just be an MK1924FCV", but I was seriously confused when I saw this thing hiding inside.

It lacks branding compared to their older 2.5" drives, omitting anything to do with "Caviar" or "Tidbit" etc. I'm not sure what their intended market was, (presumably only OEM?) but it's quite strange to find one of these in such a random machine from Toshiba. Of course, most laptop manufacturers who also produced hard drives (e.g. Fujitsu, Toshiba, Hitachi, IBM) did use all sorts of different drive brands, often not being loyal to their own division. I don't know if this drive was original in this laptop though...

Sadly, while the first time I got this drive running it was in perfect shape, this time it's not doing so great. By the time I finished all the tests in this video, it already started to fail rapidly, where I can't view the contents of the drive anymore. The stiction & constant tapping surely aren't helping, even with attempting everything I can do to stop it sticking so badly.
I'll make a short at some point (or a longer video if necessary) showing the insides of this unit, alongside it running speedsys or hdmotion if it's still possible. Windows can't be installed, as you'd expect from the symptoms above.

It'll make a nice display piece, at least.

I've posted some pictures of this unit here, if you're interested: https://bananahdd.nl/index.php/2024/0...

Chapters:
0:00 Startup & Spin-down
0:16 Spinrite v6.0 Performance Benchmark
1:11 Running hdmotion
4:34 Running Speedsys (v4.78)
5:12 Spin-down (final)

Thanks for checking out the video!
(wow, you read all this text?)