t500 construction

I got a T500 w P8400 and integrated graphics. Even when it is cold in the room and I stop the fan manually in tpfancontrol or pfccontrol (this seems to work rather well) and there is no noise from the top left corner there is still fan-like whirring from the bottom right corner. This noise from the right side stops only rarely.
What is the source of it?
How to minimize it?

 

That would be your hard drive. You can shorten the time it takes for your OS to turn the drive off, but if there's any activity then it won't turn off. Other than that, there isn't a whole lot you can do short of buying a quieter drive.

 

I have Hitachi 160 gb 5400 HDD. I thought it might be the hdd, but the thing that surprises me is how much the noise resembles a notebook fan. Previously I had ntbs only w slower hdds, the noise was very different. Does it perhaps have something to do with thinkpad's active hdd protection?

I intend to buy a SSD, but only after few months.
Would switching of some activities to SD card or thumbdrive minimize the noise? I have 2gb of ram and run XP, so I guess the pagefile on HDD is not much used. Would perhaps something like eboostr help?

 

That's one of the most irritating things about using notebook computers, being so close to the motherboard, the fans swirling the air around you, the whirring and purring. When my T500 arrives sometime this month, it will not replace my desktop (sitting 5 feet away from me) at home, it will be only used when I'm on the road.

 

Well, as I understand it now, my T500 barely uses the fan at all. The strange fan-like noise seems to be coming from HDD. I think this will make me enter the SSD era few months earlier.