[mediahound]

I've been playing around with my 2 hard drives (trying to decide which one to run off of and which one to use solely for backups), and while the the Seagate is totally silent when idling, it's actually louder than the Western Digital when seeking. This makes it slightly more annoying to use to run off of.

The WD sounds more muffled and lower pitch when seeking. I don't really care much about the idle noise but I'm curious-what is the quietest seeking hard drive?

[OreoCookie]

All ATA harddrives on the market can be made silent. The seek time will increase, because the heads will be accelerated less and hence everything is more silent. I've set my Samsung drive to one of the lower settings and I virtually cannot say when it's seeking … especially since I've put it in the computer casing.

Do you have a MacOS 9-capable Mac (as your Mac clearly doesn't boot OS9 except for the Apple Hardware Test)? If so, an author of the German c't magazine programmed a tool which sets the `loudness' (called AAM setting) on OS 9. It's very simple, but does it's job just fine. If you have access to a pc, you could do that as well.

[mediahound]

I only have OSX. Is there such a tool for OSX?

[OreoCookie]

No, otherwise I would have said so (with OS X' hardware abstraction layer, such system tools are much harder to program). I know you have a G5, but do you have a friend with an older Mac or someone with a PC? (The harddrive must be connected internally, by the way.)

To my knowledge, there are only tools for PCs and OS9.

[tokamac]

Found at macosxhints.com :

Set Automatic Acoustic Management level on hard drives
Mon, Oct 18 '04 at 11:19AM • from: alexwegel

If you want to set the Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) feature of your hard drives, but can't use MacAAM (it's an OS 9 only application; not Classic), OpenFirmware might be the solution.

Here's my recipe for setting the primary hard drive to silent mode:

1. Enter OpenFirmware by holding Command-Option-o-f at startup.

2. Enter the following line (inside the two lines, pay attention to spaces):

Code:
0 0 0 here 428000 , ef , 4000 1 apply ata-command hd .

3. Hit return and check the output (if it prints 0, it went OK)

4. To go on booting, type mac-boot and hit return.

That's it. To apply this to another device, change the hd part of the command to the device path or alias you want (eg sd1 for the hard drive on the second SATA bus in a G5). To set a different value, change the 80 to some other dual-digit hex value in the range 80 to FE (80 = silent, FE = fast).

The bad new is that Barracuda drives don't support AAM.

[robg adds: Take care when using open firmware; you can cause some bad things to happen if you mess something up. I have not tested this hint...]

[Jacques]

Originally Posted by OreoCookie

..a tool which sets the `loudness' (called AAM setting)..

I've never heard this before, very nice. Can it be run from Classic on a Powermac G5 SATA drive? Why don't the manufactorers always set it to quiet, does it make the drive slower?

---

I seemed to have posted my question too soon, the following posts answers well enough. I'll dig in as to why these soft settings aren't used be default, if something comes of it I'll try to post back.

thanks

[tokamac]

No, MacAAM does not run in Classic, and yes, making the drive quieter makes it also slower...

[mediahound]

This is very interesting but how do you turn it off?

Originally Posted by tokamac

Found at macosxhints.com :

[reader50]

You can get MacAAM from here, if you have access to a Mac that can boot OS9.