T60 HDD noise- how noisy is your HDD?

I hear a quiet but constant "whirring" noise coming from the right bottom corner of my T60 (2623-DRU). I called the IBM tech support and they sent me a replacement drive but it had the same noise again. This time I sent the machine in for repair and they replaced the system board. I have just received the notebook and the noise is still there.

My question is: how noisy is your HDD? Mine (80 GB Toshiba) is not terribly loud but certainly audible in a quiet environment. With a new system board and new HDD, I think the chances of a failing hardware component are very low. I am also confident that there are no processes that are trying to access the HDD. Might this be just the "normal" operational noise of this machine? If so, I would be rather disappointed, since even the crappy dell of my wife is quieter than my T60.

On an additional note, my T60 also has the "fan always on" issue, but after spending hours with power manager, tpfancontrol and NHC as well as sending the machine in for repair (before I sent it for the HDD issue) I pretty much gave up the hope to get rid of the fan problem.

Any suggestion would be very much appreciated.

 

We are in the same boat. I had got my T43p a few days.

I am irritate by the fan noise: it is always on. Also, I heard the same noise from the right side of the laptop. Mine is also
Toshiba.

It is somewhat paradoxical here: I spend more money to get more hardware power but I have to underclock it to make it cooler and my ears comfortable. A waste of money, isn't it?

I am thinking of returning my laptop. Do you know the procedures?

 

This happens with almost every laptop. Since there is very little plastic insulating the HD from the outside world, the little clicks and whirrs that it makes during normal operation spinning and seeking are transmitted out. I can hear it on all the Dell's at the forest service (D620), my Lenovo C100, the macbooks around campus, and pretty much any other laptop. If you are in a quiet enough room, you can hear everything on a laptop or desktop for that matter.

 

I also have the 80GB Toshiba on my T60, and I have never noticed any noise from it at all. (And no, I'm not deaf! I notice that the new Maxtor drive in my desktop is sort of loud.)

The only noise I ever hear from my T60 is the DVD drive spinning up, and even that is just a quiet whoosh.

Chris

 

I personally think some people's ears are just more sensitive than others. If you're constantly exposed to low levels of background noise, your brain tends to ignore it after a while. I used to have 9 intake/exhaust fans on my desktop, which made it sound a lot more than silent, but now I'm just used to it. I'm pretty sure the 15 year old air-conditioner I've got in my room makes a hell of a racket, but it's just background noise to me. Because of this, minor noises such as harddisk spinning up, exhaust fans on laptops, DVD drives spinning up, etc don't really bother me all that much.

Mind you, I'm far from getting deaf. It's just that my brain has been "trained" to ignore all these extraneous background noises and focus on the issue at hand. So, the fact that some people are hearing loud noises coming from their notebooks is not really the fault (at least most of the time) of the notebook itself, but rather yours. If you're gonna return your laptop or get it serviced (to no avail) just because it may be slightly louder than pin-drop silence, then your only solution would be to get something without any moving parts. Or, you could just get used to it.

 

I don't hear anything unless the laptop is at full load or doing something to access the hdd and even then I dont really hear anything. the only thing I hear and I can only hear this in a room thats dead quiet as in library dead quiet is the fan which is a very low and slight hum. how can you tell who made your hdd and display? I'd like to know.

 

See Zaz's post pinned to the top of the Lenovo forum.

Chris

 

Thanks to you all for your comments. I think the proposition that people have different thresholds of sensitivity to noise requires little substantiation. Indeed, one can further generalize by saying that, in any instance, the noise level of something depends on a combination of three factors: sensitivity of the person, the background noise level, and the actual noise emitted by the object.

Scientifically speaking, the only way to isolate the causal impact of any of these three factors is to keep two of them constant, and let the suspected factor vary. In this case, if the same person (me!), working in the same environment (a certain library) uses a number of computers (dell inspiron 6000, 700m, ibook, and finally the T60), then we can attribute the differences in the perceived noise level of the computer to the only factor that differs across the observations, i.e. the computer itself.

In other words, I understand that I might be more senstive to noise compared to others, but it does not undermine the observation that my T60 is louder compared to other computers that I have used, and continue to use, in the same environment.

With regard to the fan noise...Again, I understand that fans produce a certain noise. Indeed, I can even admit that the fan on my T60 is even quieter than most. The problem, which is actually well documented for several thinkpad models- especially T43- is that the fan is always on, it never stops even when the computer is idle and very cool.

 

As far as the hard drive is concerned, I know on my Dell E1505 there was a setting in the BIOS, which allowed it to operate more quietly, albeit with slightly slower performance. Does the T60 have this option as well? I thought someone said it did, but I have yet to find the setting for it.

 

The only BIOS setting that I could find was for the CD-ROM. You can set it to operate in the "silent" mode.

 

NHC has an option to keep the harddrive silent, though I'm not too sure if it's manufacturer dependent. You can also control fan speeds using TPFanControl (which can be found on SourceForge).

cheers!

 

I am pretty it is not the sound from HDD (though I use the same hard drive as the first poster does).

The sound under the right palmrest seems to come from a fan from it. It is not the sound by reading and writing of a hard drive.

 

there is no fan beneath the right palm rest. The only thing there is the HDD.

 

I've got a T60 2007FUG (14" SXGA, C2D 1,8, 1GB, X1400, 80GB, DVD-RW, 9-cell) and while I haven't got any gripes about the fan yet (it's off most of the time, kicks in only every now and then), I'm a tad disappointed by the HDD noise too (must be the HDD since it clearly comes from the right palm rest). Interestingly, it's not seek/write but just the idle noise that's annoying (seek/write is fairly quiet actually). Mine is a Toshiba MK8034GSX.

Now as far as AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) is concerned, NHC shows this option blanked out. I looked around a bit and it seems that Toshiba drives may not support AAM at all (didn't find any clear info on the MK8034GSX though).

Has anyone experience in silencing these Toshiba drives?

 

The noise from the T60 has something to do with the cavity that the drive sits inside. It almost acts like an echo chamber of sorts. In another laptop I had a very quiet Seagate drive that was almost inaudible, but when placed in the T60 drive bay, made the same whirring sound.

This is my reasoning. In all the laptops I have played with that didn't have this sound, they had a ton of plastic on top of the drive area. Be it a keyboard, or some other hulk of thick palm rest. The T60 on the other hand has a wafer thin section of frame covering the bay, and then about 1-2mm of the plastic/carbon fiber palm rest. Nothing above or around the drive is able to absorb the sound, or shield it from coming out the top.

 

There isn't any space to fit any dampening material in between the drive and the cage or something like that I guess?

 

A certain volume of atmospheric space has to envelope the HD so that air can circulate freely over it.

I have exactly the same continuous, mild wind-through-pine-needles sound coming from the right side of my palmrest. 80 GB drive, although I haven't checked to see what make it is. Only noticeable in acoustical surroundings where working really close to a lot of planar reflections in the corner of a very quiet room (desks, stacked books, monitors, intersecting walls.

It's the price of power.