SATA and AAM

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Xavier

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I've been wrangling with a set of Serial ATA drives over the past two weeks after having knocked together our first watercooled system (pic). The problem was basically noise, as although the PATA Barracuda V supported Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) their SATA counterpart (the same drive with a different wired interface basically had AAM disabled because Seagate were infringing some kind of patent or other by using it across a Serial-ATA connection.

The noise became really unbearable, to the point that a few days ago I was about to swap over to a couple of WD1200JBs when I discovered a little gem of an app from an unexpected corner.

It turns out that The Hitachi Feature Tool is able to enable/disable AAM on any SATA/PATA drive which supports the standard, regardless of whether the manufacturer intended it or not. To get it working on a SATA drive you currently need a chipset which can emulate SATA as PATA (Canterwood and Springdale currently) and once enabled performance doesn't differ greatly - seek time increases by less than 2ms.

So, not a problem, more of a little gem I've stumbled on and felt like sharing :)
 

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