* sen@eccosys.com (sen@eccosys.com) Fri, Sep 21, 2001 at 09:51:26AM +0900:
> > Can you test if the drive itself gets hot ?
> I do happen to periodically pull the hard drives out of these
> machines, but I've never noticed them to be so hot that I can't touch
> them or have trouble holding/handling them.
> 
> Perhaps touching the casing of the hard disk while it's in operation
> is a better test.  This is difficult for a ThinkPad X20 due to the
> design, but it should be doable for the 600E.

Later in your mail you mentioned, you are using IBM drives. Just a few
days ago I discovered, that IBM offers a free test program for their
drives, downloadable from their site. (Sorry, I don't have the URL
handy.) One of the tests you can run with it is a temperature test for
the drive. The temperature can be shown and you can issue random seek
commands to the disk, so that busy operation gets simulated. All the
time you can watch the temperature and check if it stays in the
allowed region.

IIRC the tool is in dft-v210.exe. This program for Windows creates a
bootable disk. The same is available for Linux, but I haven't tried
that.

Hope this helps,

Björn

-- 
Bjoern Labitzke  <hermit@cs.tu-berlin.de>
   Use GPG! (Don't you use envelopes for your letters?)