Reduce Hard Drive Noise

Many modern hard drives support a function called AAM - Automatic Acoustic Management. The feature is currently supported by most hard drives from Samsung, Maxtor and Hitachi. Most hard drives have the feature disabled by default which decreases access time but increases the noise level of the hard drive. If you prefer silence over performance you might want to enable AAM to decrease the noise level of your hard drive and slightly increase the access time.

Access time has nothing to do with data transfer rates which means it is probably a good idea to activate AAM if you think that your hard drive makes to much noises. All you need is the freeware Hitachi Feature Tool. This tool makes it possible to enable, disable or choose a custom value for the Automatic Accustic Management feature.

The noise reduction depends on the hard drive of course. The noise reduction for the Samsung SP2504C was 0.5 Sone from 1.9 to 1.4 Sone by using the custom value 170. A Raptor WD1500ADFD hard drive had a reduction of only 0.1 Sone from 4.1 to 4.0 Sone. The Hitachi Feature Tool will tell you if your hard drive supports Automatic Accustic Management prior to making any changes.