Hi,
I need to do a head replacement on a Toshiba MQ01ABD100 and have spent the last 3 hours searching online for a suitable donor drive.
I have finally stumbled across a drive for sale that has an identical DRIVE REV, identical HDD code and both are manufactured in china. Even the labels are identical.
However the serial numbers are very different and they were manufactured about 2 years apart. To the untrained eye (mine) they look like a perfect match but from reading various posts online I am uncertain, as some posts have suggested the first few digits of the serial number should also match.
Could anybody guide me on this please?
Thanks

Just done a head swap on one of these myself, I just matched the model, and got the closest matching dates I could. Drive REV, HDD code we all different but still worked. I could of just been lucky, but worth a try if you have other drives laying around to try.

Great! Thanks for the info. I'll give it a try with the drive I found online.

Hi codedragon,

To spend less time searching for a donor, our website displays tables that let you easily compare the donors that we have for each model (as long as we have two donors or more).
Just enter the model name at the end of our site name to directly go to the right model: https://drive-for-parts.com/MQ01ABD100

You can then click on the column headers to sort the donors (across all pages).
Or use the "Filter table records" search field at the top right of the table, which will also filter dynamically the records found across all the paginated results.

The most important for Toshiba is matching the HDD code.
Matching the country of manufacture is usually advised, but is not mandatory as we have seen drives being repaired with a donor from another country (Philippines / China).

We just added the "Drive rev." column to further facilitate the search of the best possible donor.

By clicking any of the "In stock" button, you will reach the product page of a unique donor hard drive.

On the product pages, the "Compare donors" button let you reach quickly a thumbnails gallery that let you visually compare the donors for a given model.

If, alternatively, you click on the blue button displaying the model name (last breadcrumb, near the top of the page), it brings you back to the comparison table.

Hope this can help you save time in you future searchs for donors.