Hi,
There seems to be no activity on the drive though. I tried to generate some disk [...] In my case the disc head is constantly moving from one side to the other. (I guess so, because of the sound)
Some say the ACPI DSDT is buggy on these ThinkPads and debugging, recompiling and re-installing it with the DSDT tools makes everything work fine, but I have not bothered to try this yet. If other distros (Knoppix) ship with a working DSDT, maybe SuSE could copy it over and provide as an YOU update? Or maybe it must be compiled in to the kernel, I don't know. As far as I know the DSDT has nothing to do with the serving Operating System. Perhaps the factor is that knoppix doen't load the modules suse linux loads. But I have no deeper knowlegde at the ide subsystem to edit some suspend related stuff. So far the problem doesn't seem to be DSDT related.
Philip