AARRGGHH!! Another brilliant idea from Dell.
Customer brought in an Inspiron N5010 that started the "click of death" on the drive. Evidently Dell had decided their drives would never fail.
To replace it you have to take the cover plate over the memory off, unscrew the screw holding the keyboard in place, take out the optical drive, take the keyboard and top cover off just to get at the drive. then of course you have to reassemble it all just to find out if everything will work.
Used to be so much easier when all you had to do was take out two screws and slide the drive assembly out of the case.
= new reply since forum marked as read
...of what I term DAA or Design to Amortization Age. This is an ideology whose goal is producing a unit with an MTBF of 30 - 90 days more than the minimum IRS amortization (18 months) for computing products. You'll also note that the components requiring removal to get to that HDD are also assemblies likely to be replaced during a factory refurbishment.
The only profitable reason to make the HDD easily accessible was the hope of selling the owner a newer larger drive as an upgrade. How often does that happen?
A pretty slick business model once you have a name for yourself. 
Part of my job entails replacing stock drives on multiple brands of laptop with our drives for testing purposes. And no, they are definitely not making it any easier. Still beats trying to replace an 0201 surface mount component!
