How to make your Thinkpad HDD as quiet as possible

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I've tried to make my HDD run as little as possible, but running browsers such as Firefox or Opera
always gets the Hard disk up and running in no time. I've tried running O&O's CleverCache with no
apparent success. In my experience, I've had the most pleasing results with the following setup:


My T42 has 2GB RAM and a WD 250GB HDD set up to run,

- Centrino Hardware Control 1.9b2 :
No SMART, Standby: 1 min, Acoustic Management: 128, APM: 254 (thereby removing the annoying HDD irregular starts/stops and clicks)

- SuperCache
512MB Cache, Deferred-write, Suspend lazywriting (great prg, really accelerates defrag prgs immensely by caching sequential writes)

My power management profile is configured to power off HDD after 3 min.


How is your Thinkpad running?

Any tricks up your sleeve on getting the HDD to stop spinning periodically?

[Johan]

While I have not been experimenting as much as you with "noising down" my T42, I find this topic highly interesting, and absolutely appreciate you sharing your experience - thanks!

As to making the 250 GB Western Digital HDD more quiet, your suggestion about setting APM to 254 (in CHC) is especially valuable, as many WD Scorpio HDD's have been reported to exhibit some amount of clicking noise - and the cure mentioned in the thread Western Digital Scorpio 2.5" 5400 Hard Drives... Any Opinions? (see the post of Fri Sep 26, 2008 2:57 pm) does not always seem to help.

By the way, is there any particular reason why you use the old CHC and not the newer Notebook Hardware Control?

The ultimately quiet "harddisk" is obviously a SSD (Solid State Disk), although this solution is unfortunately rather costly - see e.g the thread SSD PATA 44-Pin for T4x. Perhaps a good time now to start saving up for a Christmas-present "from-you-to-you" - with love...

Thanks again for sharing!

Johan

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There is no particular reason why I'm using the old CHC other than initially I didn't have NET 2.0 installed, so I installed CHC 1.9b2 instead. CHC is small and has no apparent NET-dependencies and has been stable to this date. I'm undervolting my T42 1.8MHz keeping an average temperature around 41C using "dynamic switching".

Setting APM at 254 keeps the HDD at max performance and keeps it from parking the heads, which causes the clicking noise. To counteract the HDD from constantly spinning, the ordinary power management profile shuts it down after 3 min. While setting APM at 1 to enable spin down brings the HDD to an absolute halt, usually the result is frequent HDD stops and spin ups depending on specific progam loads or browser activity.


Lately, after increasing SuperCache from 128MB to 512 MB experimenting with APM set at 1, enabling spin down, it seems that the HDD spin ups occur less frequently.

[davidspalding]

SuperCache 3 is $130 ... not a cheap utility to make one's system a wee bit faster. Have you confirmed their claim that it speeds some performance?

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SuperCache certainly seems to cache random writes more effectively than other cache software that I've used. When it comes to caching reads I'm not so sure what is most effective. There are two read algorithms: "most resently used" or "most frequently used".

I'm using the defragmentation program called VOPT and I can see that the process is drastically sped up. Instead of reading/writing the typical small amount of blocks - making the hard drive heads work overtime by moving the heads rapidly back and forth, enabling SuperCache, VOPT will read and sort a huge amount blocks, filling up the cache, and then write a large sequential block, thus reducing time-consuming and unneccesary hard drive head movement. This is easily seen, heard and felt (VOPT moves blocks a lot faster, less noise and vibration from HDD)

At what cost/risk? Well, deferred writes alway poses a risk of losing data, if the computer is reset before emptying the cache onto the hard drive.