# Alternative Acoustic Management apps ?



## mr.sneezy (Mar 26, 2011)

Hi all,

After using the great info here on the forum, I successfully and fairly easily upgrades an Aussie spec Tivo HD from the stock 160Gb drive to a 500Gb drive. Thank you all.

The new drive is much louder in background hum than the original. I have tried to use the recommended AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management) apps noted here but with no success.
HDDScan - This app will not access IDE or SCSI Featues of the SATA drive. I think that's where AAM is set. 
I tried five drives, two internal IDE to the PC, one other SATA via a PCI card, and one USB HDD. Can't access AAM via HDDScan on any... 
Hitachi Feature Tool 2.11 - I made a boot CD for that. While it can see AAM on the internal IDE drives on my tinkering PC, it can't see the SATA on the PCI SATA interface card. No DOS driver I'm guessing.

So, can anyone suggest another bit of Windows SW (for XP) that they have used (not just seen) for AAM adjustment that I should try ?

Thanks
Martin


----------



## kinggabbo (Dec 20, 2007)

Not sure if this is the problem, but did you run HDDScan as administrator (right click on the executable and choose run as administrator)?


----------



## mr.sneezy (Mar 26, 2011)

Yes.


----------



## kinggabbo (Dec 20, 2007)

Which hard drive are you using? I had a Hitachi 7000.3 that was loud and would not allow access to the AAM.


----------



## generaltso (Nov 4, 2003)

Seagate drives also do not allow you to change the AAM settings. Though, if it's background hum that you're hearing, the AAM settings probably wouldn't help anyway. It's the seek noise that AAM can make quieter.


----------



## Stuxnet (Feb 9, 2011)

You can try a Linux livecd that supports "hdparm". Or you can boot from the jmfs livecd (search this forum) and run HDPARM from the command line. Here are some HDPARM command line examples to set AAM. FDISK will identify your HDD designation (for example, /dev/hda, /dev/sdb, ...)


----------



## supersnoop (Nov 13, 2007)

You need to try an older version of HDDScan. I think the latest is 3.3, and I could never get it to work. I know version 3.0 did work for me.


----------



## Eddief66 (Oct 24, 2009)

Reported.


----------

