Thinkpads Forum

muffd wrote:I ran a scandisk and it returned nothing. Do you suggest running another tool to see if the drive is faulty? I thought it was just mine too until I read about others having the same problem.

muffd wrote:Thanks Marin, I will try this out tonight. Wish I brought it to work with me.

muffd wrote:Are there any 7200 500gb drives yet? I don't think I've seen em but if I do, I'd rather have that.

muffd wrote:I got this yesterday but still didn't run any tests but can you tell that right off the bat this drive is much better than the Seagate that was here last week. I don't experience any lag with any of the normal everyday tasks that I was seeing last week. Watching HD downloads was perfect and something I could not say when the Seagate was installed. I am debating now if I should get one of these for my wife to put in her T60.

yak wrote:My $0.02 on the first two:

(1) Yes, T61 is limited to SATA-I speeds, 1.5Gbit/s which roughly equals to transfer of 150MB/s of raw data. I don't know what's the maximum throughput of your Seagate drive but it definitely does not exceed 100MB/s. So you see, the only type of drives you will hot the SATA-I barrier with are SSDs. Your T61 can handle everything your Seagate drive can deliver.

(2) I haven't read these datasheets but they probably list what HDDs the T61 could be ordered with. There's no technical barrier at 250GB. You certainly won't have any problems with drivers bigger than that, I myself am using a 320GB drive in a T60 and there are numerous reports here from people using 320GB and 500GB drives in T60 and newer ThinkPads (not older ones because they use PATA connectors).

Eudoxus wrote:If there are some problems with SATA II and T61, then it is clear, that bot all machines are affected. I used to run Momentus 7200.4 for a while and no problems at all. However, I removed the drive from my machine as the proformance gain was not as big to justify the noise. Now I am waiting for WD Scorpio Blue 320GB drive which is going to arrive tomorrow. Let's see hot it performs in comparison to Momentus 7200.4 Some members of this venerable forum have said, that WD should be a bit more responsive in spite of the fact that it is 5400RPM drive.

Eudoxus wrote:I just sold my Momentus 7200.4 and invested the money in Scorpio Blue.

Hope it will work as expected.

Troels wrote:I've read a lot of irks and bugs when using the 7200.4 series with the T61/p ... i just don't get it. It works without any problems in T60/ps, whether capped to SATA I or not. I haven't heard of people having issues with SATA II on different notebooks that support it, so something regarding the implementation of SATA II on the T61/p is different.

3) If all other solutions fail, it might be because of the power management technology which is used (supported in ATA standards) and head parking. My external P7K500 does the same, but i cannot change this behaviour due to the fact that it is connected by USB.
So, taking no responsibility of the outcome :
Download hdparm: http://hdparm-win32.dyndns.org/hdparm/ (last one)
Run from a command prompt from the directory where hdparm.exe is located:

Code: Select all

hdparm -i hda

and verify that "Model:" corresponds to the drive model no. you want to modify the power settings for.
If it is, run:

Code: Select all

hdparm -B 254 hda

Not sure if this voids any warranty though, so be careful.

bautista.ekonomista wrote:Is the hdparm fix permanent; that is, every after reboot, I don't have to set the fix?

After rebooting my T61, I can still hear the clicking sound.

I really am losing hope with my Seagate drive and makes me think that I did indeed made a dumb decision in going for a Seagate HDD. I should've trusted my instincts about WD.

hdparm -M 254 hda

setting acoustic management to 254
HDIO_DRIVE_CMD:ACOUSTIC failed: Input/output error
acoustic              =   0 <128=quiet ... 254=fast>

Troels wrote:First, yes i don't think acoustic management can be set either, at least not by hdparm.
My HDD hasn't clicked every since, but i remember that when i entered the same command, it said that the current power management was unknown, and would be voided by applying the 254 level.
If this is true for other drives i'm not sure, but the only solution would be a start-up script to run that command in that case.
Kinda horrible that it should click that much though!


Secondly... did you do anything out of the ordinary before re-booting, i.e. system reset etc. ? Try shutting it down manually and see if it goes past this. It sounds like this:
http://forums.techguy.org/windows-xp/49 ... oblem.html
Unless you run Seagate's own drive fitness tools, there's no certain way to know if the hdd is dead or not. I really doubt that it is though.