Turning off Acoustic Management on Maxtor drives

[deagz]

On previous DM40~60 drives they had a utility which would turn off Acoustic Management on the drive. AM would slow down the seeks in order to quiet the drive down.

I have a DiamondMax 10 300gb, and apparantly it has "quiet drive" on it. I would like to know if there was any way of knowing if this feature is enabled and how I would go about turning it off. Maxtor's website doesn't seem to even have it's old AMSET utility for the older drives.

 

[Madwand1]

SiSoft Sandra will report AAM being on in the notes/warnings section, but it won't tell you exactly what the setting is at, nor let you change it.

AAMSET could still be available somewhere, buried, but it's pretty simple; works only on PATA drives IIRC, and only lets you change the setting to something, doesn't report what the setting is.

Based on my own sampling, including several 300 GB drives, I believe that all Maxtor drives ship with AAM enabled, and set to "high performance". Paradoxically, there's another setting, "recommended", and that's a bit lower than "high performance" -- so Maxtor doesn't follow their own recommendation. There may not be any difference in effect between the "recommended" and "high performance" -- it's up to the drive to interpret this setting.

I happen to believe that this setting is probably a good compromise, and is probably not worth the effort to change, however, I've almost always disabled AAM because, well, performance > x for x in {silence, heat, sanity, ..} for me (just kidding, well, sort of). I've never measured the performance difference; and just assumed that no AAM is better than AAM set to max performance, which it might be, slightly.

HDDLife, though somewhat buggy in my experience, can do this job, at least with Microsoft drivers for non RAID configurations. The version that I tried had bug fix reports which claimed that it would allow changes on platform drivers, but it wouldn't work -- it would just shows the settings; changes had no effect. Uninstalling the drivers, using the default Microsoft ones, changing the setting, installing the platform drivers worked.

 

[Auric]

Google-a-roo-ing for AMSET and SETACM should be fruitful otherwise Hitachi Feature Tool will do the trick. Lastly, there is a free Windows proggy called SilentDrive that works also. However, I would try Maxtor's first to more surely read the current setting according to Maxtor's standards and without inadvertently changing it. At least with previous IBM drives (and perhaps continuing with Hitachi as they aquired IBM storage) their FT allowed for a full range of incremental adjustment, whereas other manufacturers tended to limit adjustment to a few presets. FT cannot overcome that but as said, I don't know if the presets allowed will exactly match those of the drive.

 

[Auric]

I'm fairly certain I recall AMSET having a command to read the setting -which may be undocumented but is an available option when run. I forgot it is so old that serial drives may not be supported, in which case perhaps FT is preferred.

 

[deagz]

Thanks for your 2 cents guys. I just tried amset with a dos boot cd. It lists 4 command line options. quiet,fast,off and check.

I tried "/check" and it went looking and it found nothing. My guess is that it doesn't support SATA. I'm going to try FT.