AAM Not Supported on Western Digital HD (MFG NOV 2005)?

[greenkawasaki]

Hello,

I just purchased a brand new 200GB, SATA 300, Western Digital hard drive (WD2000JS) the other day. I chose this hard drive over the Seagate because it supposedly supports AAM while I knew Seagate did not after reading through the threads here.

So I install the new drive, put in the Hitachi Feature Set Tool CD, and it says under the Acoustic Management option: "Not Supported". I already have my 36GB Raptor turned down to 128. What gives?

The manufacture date is November, 2005 and is a black top model. It advertises "softseek" on their site, which I believed is their name for AAM. Is it on by default? I would doubt it as it decreases performance.

Thanks.

[Shining Arcanine]

Do a google search on a utility called WinAAM. It should be able to activate AAM on the drive so that it will be avaliable to the Hitachi Feature Tool.

[greenkawasaki]

I tried WinAAM already, and from what I've gathered the program does not work if you're not using Microsoft drivers where I'm using an Nvidia board. From their google translated site:

"Probably you use not the Windows own non removable disk driver, but an alternative driver for your Motherboard (e.g. of nVIDIA or Promise). These drivers do not offer (still) support for the possibility of sending RK A-commands to the non removable disk. Microsoft defined special control codes for it."

Anyone know how I can get around this?

Thanks!

[greenkawasaki]

Well I've tried a few more things to no avail.

So thus far,

WinAAM doesn't work because I'm on an Nvidia board
Hitachi Tool says this drive doesn't support AAM
Tried the Hiren Boot CD's MHDD and it still says my drive doesn't support AAM again.

I tried contacting their support but their site's 'Ask a question' feature is terrible. After submitting your question it responds with a bunch of automatically chosen answers, and asks you to click on the 'Submit Question' button if none of the answers help (which they didn't). Unfortunately this button is no where to be found. I tried 'updating' my question, but have no idea if it actually gets to anyone. And there is no direct email address.

So I've decided that AAM is just not an available option on the Western Digital JS series drives. Has no one else bought one of these drives?

I mean the drive is sufficiently quiet enough. Probably the quietest drive I've ever used. The soft seeks are probably even nicer on the ears than my older Samsung P80. I don't know if AAM will even make a difference as my drives are already suspended in my P150. I just can't help but want to be able to enable AAM just to see if it improves more. I guess it's the silentpcreview'er in me. It's really driving me bananas.

[greenkawasaki]

So I decided to give Western Digital Support a call today. First, I spoke a lady about the situation, although friendly she didn't know what I was talking about and transferred me to their advanced department.

I was then finally connected to a gentleman, one who sounded like he knew what he doing, but unfortunately had no idea what AAM, or even had no idea what Softseek (WD's own trademark) was, which I thought was incredulous. I told him to look it up on the Internet, and that was the end of that.

I hate to rag on WD as their product looks nice, worked the first time, and even their support was quick and friendly (although useless) so I'll let you all draw your own conclusions.

[madmofo]

So I install the new drive, put in the Hitachi Feature Set Tool CD, and it says under the Acoustic Management option: "Not Supported". I already have my 36GB Raptor turned down to 128. What gives?

The manufacture date is November, 2005 and is a black top model.

I was able to enable AAM on a WD2500JS (Nov-2005) drive and set it to 128 using ftool v2.0 -- i865pe chipset motherboard.

My advice, try disabling advance HDD features in your motherboard' BIOS and give ftool another try.

[greenkawasaki]

Thanks for the tip, however, I went into my Bios and there doesn't appear to be any option for advanced hard drive features excluding enabling SMART (which is disabled). Perhaps, you can only enable AAM on an intel chipset and not on an Nvidia nForce4 (Gigabyte K8N-SLI which is board) with the WD JS drives.

Does anybody know if the chipset matters for enabling AAM using the Hitachi boot tool?

Madmofo: Did enabling AAM on the WS drive make a noticeable difference. I've been running it suspended, and it's probably the quietest drive I've ever used, could AAM make it much better. I'd be interested to know. Thanks!

[Christopher]

Hello greenkawasaki, if you enable S.M.A.R.T in bios you should be able to make the harddrive use acoustic management with the one if not all of your downloaded utility programs that you mentioned before.

There are other good things that comes with enabling S.M.A.R.T, such as monitoring the drives temperature in realtime and health. So you could in theory predict your harddrive's failure.

Enabling AAM on western digital harddrives makes a big differense in the noise level. Good luck.

[Christopher]

You can use this tool to enable acoustic management with your wd drive. Very good program.

[greenkawasaki]

Maybe my WD2000JS is screwed up or something, but i tried enabling SMART in my BIOS and tried the Hitache Ftool again without any luck. My raptor still says its available and set to 128, while my WD2000JS says it's not even supported.

I also tried the program mentioned, systool, but it pops up saying that Acoustic management isn't even supported on either drive (weird). Anyways, maybe I should go install my drive on an intel motherboard and see what happens.

I knew I should have bought the samsung. Sigh.

Anyone else want to give this a go?

[scandium]

To quote from Western Digital's knowledge base:

"Western Digital does not provide software that will change the Acoustic Management settings on Western Digital hard drives.

If you have an Intel chipset based motherboard listed in Answer ID 1004, you can use a program called the Intel Application Accelerator to change the Acoustic Management settings for our hard drives. This utility can be downloaded and installed from Intel's web site."


However I did give the Systool utility linked above a try on my 1600JS, "read" the AAM setting on my drive (which was "disabled, performance mode"), checked the box to "enable acoustic management" then set the slider all the way over to "quietest" and successfully wrote the change, enabling acoustic management on my 1600JS and nforce4 motherboard chipset (and I also use the nvidia sw hd drivers).

As I don't find the muffled, low pitched seeks on my 1600JS distracting I then set it back to "fastest", wrote that setting, unchecked "enable acoustic management" and then wrote that too just to make sure its back in performance mode

So I can confirm that the Systool utility linked above can change AAM on 1600JS (and by extension it should be able to on other JS series drives) with nforce4 mb & drivers.