T61p loud harddrive

Last week I got my T61p NH05GGE with a 100 GB 7.200 U/min harddrive.
Even if the fan is on, the harddrive is audible more than it and in my feelings it is loud. Do you have the same experience? I know what is loud is very relative, but is your drive audible as well? And are there possibilities to run it at lower speed? I tried some tuning with hdparm (Linux) but this helped not as much. I have purchased this drive because it was part of a special offer of this notebook. I urgently wait for a good SSD offer.

Thomas

 

What type of sound is it making. Is it a whinning sound or clicks

 

My hard drive is by far the loudest part on my T61p, much louder than the fans even.

It doesn't help that Vista is always indexing it and what not as well.

I guess I wouldn't worry about anything wrong with your laptop, I think it's just a loud drive like mine.

Most of the time it doesn't bother me, although I do notice it from time to time.

 

It is like a fan running at higher speed.

 

You have a 7200RPM drive which is fast, but they are also very noisy compared to the 5400RPM ones which are slower.

Also the T61 is very quiet (the fans make almost no noise) so the HDD is more noticeable. The HDD is the loudest part of my machine as well and it is 5400RPM!

 

do you know the specific brand and model of the hard drive u have?

 

Same here. I doubt you (the OP) have anything to worry about.

 

I installed a Travelstar 7200 gb 7200 rpm drive in my T61p and it is totally silent. I use it about 12 hours/day and I've never heard it.

 

Here is my information of the drive. Interesting note, there is acoustic management available, but if I try to modify it via "hdparm -M 128 /dev/sda"
then it says "Input/output error" and "acoustic = not supported"


ATA device, with non-removable media
Model Number: ST910021AS
Serial Number: 5MH0P60L
Firmware Revision: 4.06
Standards:
Supported: 7 6 5 4
Likely used: 7
Configuration:
Logical max current
cylinders 16383 16383
heads 16 16
sectors/track 63 63
--
CHS current addressable sectors: 16514064
LBA user addressable sectors: 195371568
LBA48 user addressable sectors: 195371568
device size with M = 1024*1024: 95396 MBytes
device size with M = 1000*1000: 100030 MBytes (100 GB)
Capabilities:
LBA, IORDY(can be disabled)
Standby timer values: spec'd by Standard, no device specific minimum
R/W multiple sector transfer: Max = 16 Current = ?
Advanced power management level: unknown setting (0x8001)
Recommended acoustic management value: 254, current value: 0
DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
Cycle time: min=120ns recommended=120ns
PIO: pio0 pio1 pio2 pio3 pio4
Cycle time: no flow control=240ns IORDY flow control=120ns
Commands/features:
Enabled Supported:
* SMART feature set
Security Mode feature set
* Power Management feature set
* Write cache
* Look-ahead
* Host Protected Area feature set
* WRITE_BUFFER command
* READ_BUFFER command
* DOWNLOAD_MICROCODE
* Advanced Power Management feature set
SET_MAX security extension
* 48-bit Address feature set
* Device Configuration Overlay feature set
* Mandatory FLUSH_CACHE
* FLUSH_CACHE_EXT
* SMART error logging
* SMART self-test
* IDLE_IMMEDIATE with UNLOAD
* SATA-I signaling speed (1.5Gb/s)
* Phy event counters
* Device-initiated interface power management
* Software settings preservation
* SMART Command Transport (SCT) feature set
Security:
Master password revision code = 65534
supported
not enabled
not locked
frozen
not expired: security count
not supported: enhanced erase
Checksum: correct

 

I have found a interesting discussion about it: see link below, summarized it seems to be that Seagate does not support acoustic management any more due to patent issues.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=159448
http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm