Last fall I purchased a new Haitachi HTC426030G7AT00 drive for a salvage Thinkpad X41 tablet I had aquired. However, I soon discovered the notorious continuous "click-THUNK" noise of the drive parking it's heads while idle (confirmed by SMART load/unload count). By that point the drive was out of the seller's return period, so thus I went to the task of researching the issue. The noise does not seem to indicate a mechanical issue; it is believed to be over-aggressive power management. In the end, no firmware/driver updates to the X41 or drive itself, nor the hdparm -255 or -254 commands, had any effect on the noise. As far as the hdd firmware updates go, I tried several different versions and alterations to the configuration files but the update always failed. I suspect the reason for the failure is that the drive I have differs in some small way from the drives the X41 was originally configured with.
My brother is now in need of a tablet pc and so I am trying once again to fix the drive issue. I will attempt to retrace my troubleshooting attempts to post additional info here soon (and hopefully find some critical bit I overlooked). In the meantime, any thoughts or info from this community would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
references:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_w ... e_clickinghttp://support.lenovo.com/en_US/downloa ... D=DS002826