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.

Run silent drive after unzipping the 18K freeware to a location on your hard drive. It should automatically detect your IDE drives and display the drives current setting, it will most likely be disabled. To silence your hard drive you would select the
leise (silent) switch, mittel (medium) means a balance between performance and noise and laut (noisy) means maximum performance but more noise. Click on seek-test after you changed the setting to hear how noisy your hard drive is.

You can change the settings back to default of course and everything will be as it was. The settings you make are saved by the hard drive itself. It might be that your bios is reverting the changes on every start. This would mean that your only option would be to add silent drive to your autostart.

The parameter would look the following:

SlilentDrive -d0 -mo

with -d0 to -d3 identifying the hard drive and -m0 (off), -mm (medium) and -mq (silent)

An alternative that also works with SATA hard drives is Hitachis Feature tool that is also working with most hard drives out there. Hitachi provides a download of a boot disk or iso image of the tool which you have to boot from to use. The great thing about this is that users that are not using Windows XP or 2000 will be able to change the settings with the boot disks.