Thinkpads Forum

I found this mail, of someone claiming the noise from the harddrive/ harddisk while googling for my issue on the net.

http://zurich.ai.mit.edu/hypermail/thin ... /0087.html

I too find the head-seek noise, wich almost never stops, even now i am elliminating processes, gotten down to 50... very anoiyng.
I have set the harddrive to go to bed at 30 sec.
On battery and the minimum of 3 min. for AC.

Still it wakes up constantly, this wouldn't be much of a problem if it wouldn't have this noise and as for the fan and the harddrive spin, i find this very comfortable, even really good!
My disk is a Model HTS541080G9SA00 it is a 80 GB that came with this model. 1951-FDG

Anyone here having the same issue?

Thanks,

Are you running Vista? Is this a new computer?

When you first run Vista, it indexes your hard drive. This will take approximately 20 hours to complete. Just leave your computer on overnight for about 2 or 3 nights.

No, i should have mentioned, i use XP and it is not a new computer.
So indexing should not be the issue, i even removed this function in XP by deinstalling it from configuration-->software-->windows apps

I hope the continuing activity can be explained by someone, and as for the clicky disk sound, i am not being fussy i feel, i think this could be a lot less noisy, but maybe someone has a tip for me
Another footnote, i updated the firmware of the Hitachi a week ago and it didn't fix this noise

each hd manufactuer has their own firmware configurtion software. run the appropriate one. (may require making a bootable floppy) and change the acoustic settings for the drive. this hits performace a little but will give you a quieter drive.

also, nhc can control this for some drives (my fujitsu works).

fyi, my hdd's rotational sound is louder than my cpu fan or anything else on my z61m.

I would suggest the utility Filemon to track down which program makes the frequent disk accesses.

you don't need a separate util to monitor which process is accessing the drive.

task manager => processes tab => view menu => select column => check read and write i/o boxes

you will get which process has read or written how many kbs since task manager started...

Thanks a lot! jkahng and sogo!
Looking into the firmware for my drive and have checked the read and write boxes, didn't know that one!!!
For one wcescomm.exe a process started by activeSync is one of the worst, making the harddisk work constantly!!!!
Also firefox keeps my harddrive spinning as well, don't understand why this would wan't to acces the disk...why does a browser want to acces my drive?

Firefox reads and writes to cache, history and cookies files on hard drive. It also reads hard drive when it needs to use plugins like flash player.

I put my firefox files onto a ram drive so that hdd wakes up less. SSD is the ultimate solution and I will probably get one in upcoming months.

Hello Sugo,

That sounds like a very good idea, some people here are also trying to find ways to boot from flash media, for instance CF in a ATA/IDE adapter or in the PCM-CIA slot, i saw you'd replied questions about this earlier.
But booting or not (wich to me sounds ideal) i have a T60, and this does not have a build in reader.
A usb stick sticking out is kind of annoying as well, so i have to look into this use of the PATA bridge, if not as a boot replacement, maybe you could give me an insight into using it with progs like firefox to do the temporary stuff and avoid the Harddisk as much as possible.

SSDs are still expensive. SATA versions are still rare compared with PATA. If you have a T60, you have the luxury to use the PATA version in a UltraSlim Bay HDD Adapter.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLi ... sd&x=0&y=0

CF adapters can be cheaper as one can buy a 8GB under USD $100 these days. However, you are on your own to make sure the OS, CF adapter and CF card play well with each other. For Windows XP, you want the CF card and adapter to support UDMA and fixed disk mode.

Since I have a X60s, this is the most promising CF-SATA product I have found.
http://www.addonics.com/products/flash_ ... sahdcf.asp

Either way, disabling Paging File in Windows XP will reduce HDD accesses and save precious flash rewrite cycles.