How do I tell if it's my hdd or my fan that's making noise? (laptop / linux)

[Infohawk]

If I had to guess the noise is from the hdd because the amount of airflow being generated doesn't seem to match the noise.

It doesn't seem like noplug is doing anything even though i don't have devfs enabled and I even have syslog shutdown right now.

 

[vegetation]

What laptop? Most laptops I've seen don't have the fan on all the time, just when the load is moderate to high. Older hard drives (less than 6GB) can be very noisy so if you have one of those, it wouldn't be a surprise.

 

[Infohawk]

Sorry, should have specified my hardware first.

I have a compaq 700 us presario / duron processor / via mobo / hitachi hdd 20gb.