• Welcome to Overclockers Forums! Join us to reply in threads, receive reduced ads, and to customize your site experience!

Anyone with a WD 1TB Black tried using Hitachi feature tool to change AAM?

Overclockers is supported by our readers. When you click a link to make a purchase, we may earn a commission. Learn More.

MadMan007

Magical Leopluridon Senior
Joined
Nov 28, 2001
Location
in a magical field
Just wondering if anyone here has a WD 1TB Caviar Black and has tried using Hitachi Feature Tool to change the AAM? I'm pretty sure it can be changed, I was just wondeirng how much it might quiet down the seeks. Having a 7200RPM with good STR but quiet would be awesome.

If anyone has one of those drives and is adventurous to try it here's the utility download page: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm?linkto=QL I know it works on a WD6400AAKS, when I got that drive the seek times were poor and I used the tool to change AAM to maximum performance and seek times improved.
 
I used my xp machine to make a boot disk and tried it out and it worked for both my 72 gig raptor and my 160 gig caviar which are both older models. The caviar was set to auto and the raptor was set to 125 which was the quietest level so I disabled aam and ran the little test on my raptor and it didn't sound a whole lot louder, not enough to justify the minor perf hit anyway but for my 7200 drive I still couldn't hear it even with aam disabled. I looked for a utility like that about a year ago on the WD site but no such luck so thanks for the good find.
 
Welp, I've got some of the Caviar Blacks coming so I will try this myself :p If the seek noise at quietest AAM level can match the 6400AAKS I will be pleased enough. I also need to dampen the case a bit and mount the HDs with some kind of softmounts and that will help a lot too. The random seek grinding you get in things like HDTach are pretty unusual in realworld use in my experience anyway.
 
Well I can report that it works on the drives and drops the seek noise greatly, it turns in to a muffled background sound rather than a pushy harsh sound. The case I have them in is cheap materials and the drives aren't soft-mounted or anything yet though. One sad thing to report is that it drops the random seek times in HDTune/HDTach by a lot, from ~12.5ms to ~18ms :( when I did something similar on my WD6400AAKS but to improve performance the worst case was 15ms so I was hoping for something like that. There's also no way to set intermediate AAM values but I guess that's just how AAM is.

So now I've got fast STR but poor seeking drives, lol, I was tempted by some of the other large drives out there but one thing or another kept me away. If it wasn't for the Samsung after 3 month bad sector reports I would have gotten those, and the WD10EADS Greenpower was pricy or harder to find. I guess I'll just have to 'suffer' with these :p, for my use random seeks shouldn't really matter but I'll keep them quiet, maybe soft-mounting will make a big difference and I could speed them up again. At least the price was right at $110.
 
Last edited:
Sweet price on that. I've used the util on my wd640, just to see how quiet it could get, but my fans kinda drown out everything and I set it back for max performance. Very nice tool, especially for HTPCs.
 
Back