From: Rich_Chong_at_mail.share.org
Date: Sat Oct 03 1998 - 10:42:21 EDT
Your COM1 problem may be because, Com1 and the IR port often conflict. My
tp560 disables the com1 port if i do a bios reinitialize.
Hard drive noise you are hearing is called thermal recalibration. It is the
hard drive's bios performing a few head seeks every once in a while to
recalibrate the head positioning voice-coil servo. My 4gb travelstar drive
has 12,500 tracks per inch (>10times finer resolution than a 1200dpi
laserjet!) and does this periodic thermal recalibration (sorry i never
timed it). Thermal recal has been around a long time and varies not only
between manufacturers, but between hard drive models, and also between
individual drive firmware revisions! For example, the some older ones did a
hard-coded timed recal, messing up AV intensive programs, the newer ones do
it based on both time and disk inactivity.
Now i'm not saying that you don't have a problem. Hard drives are very
mechanical and sensitive. I know someone who crashed his thinkpad drive by
just accidently dropping a small paperback on his running system. There are
also grey areas between flawless and crashed. Post your exact system model,
or even better, if you can tell us the harddrive model, we can compare
noises. I just went from a 810mb (dsoa-20810) to a 4.3gb (dkla-24320
9.5mm!) drive and even though both are IBM travelstars, the operational
sound characteristics are extremely different. The new one has a quieter
motor but seeking actions sounds more hollow. Random recal tinkling noises
wouldnt bother me, but thunking sounds (which were normal in my real old
tp500 700mb travelstar) would bother me.
Rich
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Thu Jan 23 2003 - 09:54:25 EST