T400 speed issue

[comicbookguy75]

All,

I am hoping someone can help me please. I have been rolling out t400 laptops for the past 9 months and have had no real issues with speed, that is until recently. The new T400 machines we are recieving from Lenovo have a different HDD in them, and they now take approx. 30 mins to boot up to the desktop Icons.
Originally the machines came with Hitachi Travelstar discs in them and we are now getting Seagate discs. This is the only change.
The machine POST fine and then from after POST to desktop icons like I say is around 30 mins, during this time the HDD is getting thrashed constantly, the CPU is running at next to nothing, there is no spyware on the machine or viruses. Even a re-image does not help.
I have tried:-
Updating the BIOS
Running seagate tools to check the discs ( all pass )
finding a firmware update for the discs. (there are none)
The machine itself is fine as if we put in a Hitachi disc then everything goes back to normal and the machine boots at a normal speed.
The only thing I have notice is the discs have a different transfer speed, the Hitachi is 1.5Gb/s and the Seagates are 3Gb/s but I don't see why this would cause an issue.
Also this is not just one machine I have so far swapped 30 Seagate HDD's for Traveltars and they have sorted out all of the issues.
They are both 160Gb drives 7200rpm
Seagate: Momentus 7200.4
Hitachi: Travelstar 7k320-160

Was hoping someone might be able to help or at least say they have come across this issue before (to prove I am not going mad). Lenovo can offer no explanation and are just swapping the discs but it would be nice to get to the bottom of it.

Thanks in advance.

[Harryc]

Assuming you have your own corporate image, what happens if you install a vanilla XP pro (or Vista) on one of the Seagates without any of the Lenovo drivers or software? If that boots right up, you know you have a Lenovo driver or software problem associated with the Seagates. If not, then it's a hardware problem. Also I'd be interested in seeing some disc benchmarks run against both types of drives in your machines.

[comicbookguy75]

OK thanks for the reply am just currently installing a Vanilla XP copy onto it and see what happens. I'll see if I can get some benchmarking done on these discs too.