constant spinning of HD normal?

[Piran]

I am new at this forum so if I ask something stupid or at the wrong place don't shoot me. ;=)

I have a new Thinkpad R50p with a 60GB 7200rpm HD (7K60) in it. I know about the FireGL T2 problem and the constant working of the fan. But on battery the fan is down but I can still hear the HD spinning. Is this normal? Both in the BIOS and in the power settings I have put that the HD should shut down after 3 mins. This never happens and it keeps on spinning. Only when going into standby does the HD power down. Is this normal or do I have a faulty Thinkpad.
I have searched this forum but couldn't find a conclusive answer.

Thanks in advance,

Piran

[Plinkerton]

I have a T42, and mine doesn't spin all the time.

[johnson]

I have the 7K60 also and I read somewhere that it spins all the time, which is what mine does.

[Piran]

Do you have any power settings affecting the HD? I.e. do you also have the setting that it should power down after a certain amount of time?

[mali]

I noticed the same with my T41p.

I have tried to find out which applications or services keep accessing the harddisk (and keep it from spinning down) using filemon (from www.sysinternals.com ).

There where three things I noticed:

svchost.exe looks for a file named "store.xml" in a particular folder. It does so every minute. This seems to be caused by some service named "wzcsvc" (must be something like "Wireless Zero Configuration Service"). If I stop this service, the regular accesses vanish ...

explorer.exe accesses tpshocks.exe every minute. If i remove the "hard disk protection" icon from the task bar, the accesses do not happen any more ...

explorer.exe keeps acessing the system drive once per minute and seems to check, whether there is space left on the device. I did not find a way to disable this behaviour ...

Tschuess

Mali