Does your T400 HDD ever stop working and go to idle mode for low power?

My T400's HDD almost never stops. I've looked at what's going on with Sysinternals Regmon and the activity is never-ending, with tens of queries and changes per second, if not more.

I guess this is one place the Vista-Intel Turbo Memory would help.

So, because the HDD never goes into the idle mode, its power consumption never drops. Guess that adds another 0.8W or so with
the 160Gb 5400rpm Fujitsu.

P8600, XP Pro SP3, 2GB.

Anyone have any input on this? Short of shutting down many of the services, guess I'm out of luck, eh?

 

Have you checked to make sure that it isn't running a scheduled defrag? You can also turn off indexing to minimize HD activity.

 

indexing is off, and no scheduled defrags.
so you're saying when you leave your laptop sitting for a minute, you never see the hdd light blink, even faintly?
if so , I want that!

 

No, my laptop HD is periodically accessed on my Dell; I can hear the R/W heads moving every few seconds. My IBM, on the other hand, does get to shut down the HD for certain lengths of time before turning it on again to quickly read or write something.

Generally speaking though, Vista tends to thrash HDs quite a bit, although this increased activity hasn't resulted in increased HD failures or anything; its indexing, scheduled defrags, and SuperFetch services are the main culprits. If its the noise that bothers you, I would recommend using something like Notebook Hardware Control - apparently this program has reportedly reduced HD noise in some cases. Search around the forum for a recently created thread on this topic.

 

Is this happening when you are on battery? If not, who cares? When I’m plugged in this thing should perform. You might want to look into getting a quieter HD?

 

no, the hdd is quiet

it is the power consumption that bothers me. I haven't been able to get anything lower than 10W. on battery, of course, since the power manager does not report wattage otherwise.

 

I haven’t looked into this myself, but if the Vista HD mangling is still active when on battery, you might want to tweak some of this in the Power Options. For example, you can tune the indexing depending on the power state.

 

No vista, unfortunately

 

Please refer to my [How to Guide] Eliminate HDD access during normal windows usage (advanced) in Windows OS and Software subforum. It might help

Especially download procmon.exe to see what is accessing your HDD

 

^^^ This guide help my friend get rid of his HDD access issue, it might work for you too. I personally don't have this issue.

 

Cool guide. Thank you.

Deserves to be a sticky

 

rxblitzrx and I discovered another cause of periodic hdd activity is XP/Vista polling the optical drive...the hdd light is also an indicator of bus activity on T400s...

if the problem is a very consistent and recurring hdd activity light, on the order of once per second, then you can remedy the issue by "removing" the optical drive using the icon on the system tray...an alternative is to disable Windows autorun through the registry...yet a third option is to install ThinkVantage Power Manager and set the power management profile to allow a low power state for the optical drive...this will disable the optical drive after about 5min of non-use...the optical drive will spring back to life when you pop a disc in it, but while it is in the low power state, Windows will no longer poll its status and you won't see the periodic flickering of the hdd light...

T400 - Hard drive is constantly being accessed

 

thank you for this info. Potstickr, repped you.