*Quiet* hard drive for the X41?

[mareid]

Hi there.

I am seeking a replacement hard drive for my Thinkpad X41 which will eliminate (or substantially reduce) the clicking noise everyone complains about.

I have read many, many articles on this forum about various proposed solutions to the clicking. I've had my drive replaced by Lenovo. I have upgraded to the most recent BIOS. The clicking is still there. For me, the audible clicking is virtually incessant and has been for the 3.5 years I've owned this computer. In addition to the hard drive parking every so often, which makes a "click-thunk" noise, there is an intermittent but frequent "tickety-tickety-tickety" noise that only abates briefly when the hard drive is very active and resumes again when it is idle. I have several other laptops and none of them make such noises.

I am fairly good with computers, but I cannot solder. I also need storage capacity, so I can't use a tiny SSD. I have the standard Hitachi 60 GB drive and would be happy to replace it with something of the same capacity if it were _silent_. I have not been able to find a replacement.

Any ideas?

Thanks very much,

Mike

[p78]

RunCore 64GB Pro 1.8" 5mm PATA Zif Solid State Drive has a good review here : http://jkkmobile.blogspot.com/2009/01/r ... -1000.html
And it's $200 at http://www.mydigitaldiscount.com/Catego ... h+ZIF+SSDs
(The 128GB is $390)

[mareid]

Thank you for your reply. It was my understanding, based on what I've read in other threads that a ZIF drive would not be compatible with the X41. I thought that, minimally, there would be an adapter required and that there might be some issue with the voltage in the X41 not being matched to the drive, requiring soldering to fix. Am I mistaken?

Also, those prices seem fairly low and I have never heard of the brand "RunCore". Is it a good one?

Thanks,

Mike

[p78]

I forgot about the voltage issue and don't know about the soldering, sorry ...

[mareid]

Does anyone have any other ideas about quiet drive replacements?

Thanks!

[aaa]

APM and AAM settings for your current HD. I believe NHC has an interface for both. You should be able to eliminate the drive parking noises using APM, and reduce disk activity noise using AAM.

[mareid]

I finally found a good solution for my hard drive clicking noise. It has been discussed elsewhere on these forums, but I thought I would update my original post with instructions more suited to neophytes like me.

I chose to replace my old hard drive with a Kinspec SSD. For the X41, you need a 1.8" PATA SSD (i.e. NOT a SATA SSD), which is relatively rare. Kingspec makes one of the few that are available as of June, 2009. I bought mine on ebay. It was my first time shopping on ebay, but I didn't find that part of things too difficult. I chose the 64 GB SSD, which is described here:

http://www.kingspec.com/solid-state-dis ... 1064mj.htm

It cost about $250 on ebay.

Once I got it, I had very little trouble installing it. In other posts, people had commented about needing to clone your existing hard drive. I wanted a fresh install of a new operating system, so I didn't worry about. I removed the old hard drive from my laptop (you can consult the Lenovo product manual to see how to do that--it involves removing a single screw). I took the old hard drive out of the little metal enclosure and slipped the SSD in in the same orientation. The SSD comes with a sticker on it that asks you to install a jumper to select a master, slave, or cable select configuration. You can just ignore that and leave the drive jumper-free, which corresponds to choosing the cable select option. Plug the drive in, and screw the cover back on. It will be a snug fit, but it does fit properly.

Now, when you boot your computer, it will likely give one of two errors: error 0200 if you, like me, installed the drive backward the first time. If you install it correctly, you will get error 2010, which just means that you're using a drive that Lenovo didn't know about when they wrote the BIOS years ago. You can go into the BIOS during the pre-boot stage and set the system to skip over this part. The error 2010 will always appear when you boot your system, but it will only flash up briefly and then the system will boot as normal. (If you don't make the change to your BIOS settings, it will hang on the error screen every time you boot and you will have to press Esc to continue booting, if I recall correctly).

I booted my system for the first time with an Ubuntu CD in the optical drive. It happily installed Ubuntu on the new SSD and I was back in business!

The system is noticeably speedier, especially to boot. It goes in and out of suspend mode really quickly. You know how Macs always suspend and resume so fast that you get jealous of people who have them? They will be jealous of you now.

Best of all, the system is *silent*. There is no more hard drive clicking. There is only occasional fan noise. I am hypersensitive to annoying noises, so the silence means a lot to me. If this is a consideration for you, you will not regret upgrading to the SSD.

I hope this little guide will help those of you who, like me, want to upgrade your beloved X41 but, also like me, last welded in shop class in grade 7, don't want to mess with CF cards or adapters, and just want to something that works out of the box.

[sjthinkpader]

One related item is that Samsung has a free download to mitigate clicking noise in their HDDs. Their drives are already very quiet so I never used it.

I have Hitachi 1.8 inch drives too and this clicking noise is not too bad. I have not seem any noise management utility from Hitachi.

[ilakast]

The SSD comes with a sticker on it that asks you to install a jumper to select a master, slave, or cable select configuration. You can just ignore that and leave the drive jumper-free, which corresponds to choosing the cable select option.

Having read that, I first tried jumper-free and drive was not recognised in BIOS. Using the jumper as a master drive, did the trick. The exact model I have is KSD-PA18 6-064MS (in an X41t).

(It is so *silent* I can't believe it's on!)