Why does the HDD on my X20 tick tick tick?

[ralph]

Ok this is driving me nuts.
I had an original travel drive in my Thinkpad X20 320 megs ram. Took it to Italy, and fried the disk. Seemed to work ok for a few months prior to that.
Then I ordered a 40 GB Western Digital Scorpio 5400 with 8 megs cache. This drive ding donged at me every 30 seconds like it was a bell. The computer didnt even access the HDD (no light lit up). Anyone else get that?
That scared me, so I RMA'ed it and WD sent me a replacement. The new one did the same exact thing.
So I figured maybe the X20 couldn't handle ATA6 or the faster speeds or extra cache, so I ordered a 20 GB Toshiba MG2018gas. Now, whenever the computer accesses the drive, it'll tick ticks... it sounds like it's parking/unparking the heads... but it does it every 5 seconds - much more annoying then the ding dong of the WD. I dont know if this is ok or not. I tried everything I could. There were no firmware updates on Lenovo. I tried getting all the updates for win XP... i tried getting all the updates for the thinkpad... i didnt find any drivers on the toshiba site....
Thanks for any help...
Ralph

[vincentfox]

You should look around for vendor drive UTILITIES In most cases, they have to be run from DOS. The major use most people have for these tools, is there will be the capabilty to set acoustic management modes. So you boot a DOS floppy, run the tool and get your drive locked into it's "quiet" mode, and you are done. Most drives can be set to a quieter mode for a slight performance penalty.

Personally I have a Samsung drive that's the Quiet Queen. You can see reviews of it at http://www.silentpcreview.com/