I'd try a different brand of drive. I feel there is nothing wrong with using a hard drive in these conditions, laptop drives have pretty good specs for vibration and shock. I've put about 40k miles on my empegs in a 93 Cadillac Eldorado and 81k miles in a 00 Audi S4 with suspension mods, this includes drag strip, auto-x usage and countless hours of back road playtime. I've had no disk failure except for the early click of death failure of a 6GB drive in my MK1 about one week after I got in back in August 98, the replacement 6GB drive and the 12, 20 and 40GB drives I've had in the MK1 and Mk2 have been trouble free.

Unless anyone else has had a bad experience with them, try a fujitsu drive, they've been solid for me. Good luck!