WD 5000AAC Acoustic Management (1 Viewer)

[HTPCSourcer]

Hello guys,

I just bought a WD 500 GB SATA harddisk to exchange a Samsung disk that was heavily vibrating. Compared to the Samsung drive WD is almost noiseless, however, the access noises are audible and I would like to activate the drive's AAM.

I have been trying several tools to active the AAM of the WD, yet without success. The Samsung ESTool can access the WD and I was able to activate its SMART option. Unfortunately AAM was not acccessible with the Samsung tool. A series of other tools seem to work only with IDE drives and don't detect any SATA-connected units. The Hitachi FTool 2.10, which is reported to have been used on the WD drives, would run into endless boot cycles on my HTPC. Used on another PC it was unable to detect SATA drives.

Searching the internet confirmed that a) the drive has AAM and b) some people were able to activate it. Anybody out there who has come across he same issue and has found a solution?

Regards, Johannes

 

[entrecour]

I have 2 1T WD HDD's so I looked at this once but didn't get very far. I bookmarked the links below...


silentpcreview.com | View topic - Acoustic Management

Support - Downloads and Utilities

Intel® Application Accelerator - Changing Automatic Acoustic Management settings


I'd be interested to know if you notcie any improvement with AAM.

Have you tried this...

Homepage WinAAM

You have an ASUS MB (like me) so these reports are not too encouraging

ASUSTeK Computer Inc.-Forum- AAM

 

[SpudR]

You'd be better getting a spinpoint or a GP (GreenPower) drive - AAM has a high performace hit (especially if you have a fragmented drive, can be upto 20%!!)
You can also try shockmounting your drives (NOT always easy ) to reduce the vibration.

I have a GP drive, shock mounted - it's almost silent!! (unless seeking)

 

[HTPCSourcer]

I have a GP drive, shock mounted - it's almost silent!! (unless seeking)

It IS a GP drive and you don't need to shock mount it. And yes the seeeking noices are the issue.

I solved the drive access problem by changing the BIOS settings for the SATA controller from AHCI to IDE. WinAAM would still not see the drive but I found SilentDrive, a small 17 KB program that detects the drive and allows you to set three levels of noise management. Seeking noises are now almost gone. Unfortunately the setting is not permanent and gets lost at each start or wakeup from standby/hibernation.

No doubt that AAM affects the drive speed, but hey, we all want a noiseless HTPC, don't we?

Regards, Johannes

 

[entrecour]

There are reports that Notebook Hardware Control can permanently change the AAM settings...

silentpcreview.com | View topic - Cannot enable Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM)


Notebook Hardware Control (NHC) - Homepage, Downloads, Help, Docu, FAQ, News - www.pbus-167.com

 

[HTPCSourcer]

There are reports that Notebook Hardware Control can permanently change the AAM settings...

Interesting piece of software that does much more than just change the AAM. It actually reads SMART information, CPU and HD temperatures, can set power management, and, and, and ...

The good news is that NHC can change the AAM of my WD 5000AACS - the bad news is that the change is lost upon reboot and AAM is set back to fastest speed. Hence I better use the little SilentDrive utility. I could run it as a service with FireDaemon and have the service restart periodically. FireDaemon allows periodic restarts to be set between every hour to every month.

The drive accepts only two levels of AAM: Normal Seek and Quiet Seek. I measured (H2BenchW.exe) seek times of 14.7 ms and 22.7 ms respectively, so the drive will definitely slow down in a multi-file access environment when set to Quiet mode, yet transfer speed remains of course unchanged.

I applied the Hitachi Feature Tool to the drive in order to change the AAM value. Unfortunately the quiet mode is set back to Normal Seek upon reboot.

Regards, Johannes