The Definitive Maxtor Silent Store Guide Rev. 2.0

[Welch]

I forgot to say that i ran the Hitachi AAM and it was VERY straight forward and autmated. BUT the weirdest thing happen! I said my HDD was running AAM on 225 or the highest one! So i decided to run the HDD in the middle setting! When i went to test the diffrence my HDD was running 22.7ms!!!!!!! HOW COULD IT GET WORSE!!! So i decided to turn it off (AAM) and ran the results using HD Tach and it showed the usual 13.5 As tho the HDD had AAM turned off by defualt and the Hitachi program didnt recognize it? Anyhow im back where i was an losing my mind Any help would be VERY VERY Apperciated!

[Adrian Wong]

Welch,

I don't think your problem has anything to do with Automatic Acoustic Management.

There are three operating modes - Quiet, Fast and Off. It looks like your drive was set to Fast. But apparently the seek time in your drive is about the same for both Fast and Off.

Anyway, you cannot reduce the seek time any further because it is determined by the rotational speed as well as the platter density.

Please try defragmenting your hard disk at boot time using Diskeeper. Remember, boot-time defragmentation, NOT in Windows XP. Set Diskeeper to optimize everything, the swapfile, the folders, the MFT, etc during the boot-time defrag.

If that still does not work, please post another thread with a full description of your problem because from what I can see, it really isn't related to this topic.

[Welch]

I think it is related to this topic. I have tried doing that with diskeeper before
Seems like I am Doomed then! I dont want to have to reinstall Win XP but i just might have to if i wanna get a clean running machine! What i said was, my HDD was set to Quite mode to start. And then i turned it down to Fast (Even if it was in fast by defualt it wouldnt make it any slower espcially about 12ms slower by telling it to go into Fast mode ontop of fast mode!) It seems tho as if it was set on OFF from defualt! Which surprised me! the only way i got my 13.5ms seek time back was to turn AAM off!

What does Spin Up time reffer to. . . What it sounds like is the time it slowly spins the HDD up when it is first booted. Can you confirm that or do you actually know what it is becuase im only taking a educated guess.

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by Welch

I think it is related to this topic. I have tried doing that with diskeeper before
Seems like I am Doomed then! I dont want to have to reinstall Win XP but i just might have to if i wanna get a clean running machine! What i said was, my HDD was set to Quite mode to start. And then i turned it down to Fast (Even if it was in fast by defualt it wouldnt make it any slower espcially about 12ms slower by telling it to go into Fast mode ontop of fast mode!) It seems tho as if it was set on OFF from defualt! Which surprised me! the only way i got my 13.5ms seek time back was to turn AAM off!

What does Spin Up time reffer to. . . What it sounds like is the time it slowly spins the HDD up when it is first booted. Can you confirm that or do you actually know what it is becuase im only taking a educated guess.

Are you sure the hard disk was set to Quiet mode initially? And you noted no improvement when you set it to Off? That's odd.

What did you use to check the seek speed anyway? Are you sure what you recorded was the average seek time? Or average access time?

Anyway, I seriously don't think your problem has anything to do with AAM. After all, you did not notice any improvement in performance after turning off AAM, right?

[Welch]

WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT! LOL It DOES HAVE EVERYTHING TO DO WITH AAM! I downloaded the program and ran AAM, as i said before i used HD Tach. AND YES im not a putts! it was average seek time! 13.5 ms!

And when i turned it to Fast (even tho the program "hatachi" said it was on Quite. It got WORSE seek time! And then when i turned it to OFF it got the exact same speed as i clocked it before 13.5 ms! I HAVE SCREEN SHOT LOL of the 13.5! I was planning on taking screen shots of the Quite, Unqiue, and then Off mode so as to provide anyone else on here with the same drive a reffernce of expected performance boost!

[Adrian Wong]

Originally Posted by Welch

WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT! LOL It DOES HAVE EVERYTHING TO DO WITH AAM! I downloaded the program and ran AAM, as i said before i used HD Tach. AND YES im not a putts! it was average seek time! 13.5 ms!

And when i turned it to Fast (even tho the program "hatachi" said it was on Quite. It got WORSE seek time! And then when i turned it to OFF it got the exact same speed as i clocked it before 13.5 ms! I HAVE SCREEN SHOT LOL of the 13.5! I was planning on taking screen shots of the Quite, Unqiue, and then Off mode so as to provide anyone else on here with the same drive a reffernce of expected performance boost!

Welch, if you want people to help you, STOP getting so "excited".

Frankly, I can't make heads or tails of what you are trying to tell me.

In any case, why use Hitachi's tool when you can use the Maxtor utility instead? I'm not sure if Hitachi's tool will fully support Maxtor drives.

[Madwand]

I've spent a significant amount of time trying to track down this issue recently, because SiS Sandra gave a warning about Acoustic Management being enabled, and I wouldn't want "silent" mode for performance reasons.

The article's link to the AMSet no longer work. AMSet can still be download off external sources and an internal link, but it doesn't support SATA drives. And nothing that I've found so far supports (NVidia controller) RAID drives.

BTW, HDDLife (2.6...) is extremely buggy, and crashes on my SATA drives. Hitachi utilities fail to show correct information for some of my Maxtor drives.

The relevant standard draft can be found here:

http://www.t13.org/project/d1410r3b-ATA-ATAPI-6.pdf

Here's a relevant section (sorry about the loss of formatting here):

8.46.17 Enable/disable Automatic Acoustic Management
Subcommand code 42h allows the host to enable the Automatic Acoustic Management feature set. To enable
the Automatic Acoustic Management feature set, the host writes the Sector Count register with the requested
automatic acoustic management level and executes a SET FEATURES command with subcommand code
42h. The acoustic management level is selected on a scale from 01h to FEh. Table 47 shows the acoustic
management level values.
Enabling or disabling of the Automatic Acoustic Management feature set, and the current automatic acoustic
management level setting shall be preserved by the device across all forms of reset, i.e. power-on, hardware,
and software resets.
Table 47 - Automatic acoustic management levels
Level Sector Count value
Reserved FFh
Maximum performance FEh
Intermediate acoustic management levels 81h-FDh
Minimum acoustic emanation level 80h
Retired 01h-7Fh
Vendor Specific 00h
Device performance may increase with increasing acoustic management levels. Device power consumption
may decrease with decreasing acoustic management levels. The acoustic management levels may contain
discrete bands. For example, a device may implement one acoustic management method from 80h to BFh and
a higher performance, higher acoustic management method from level C0h to FEh.

I've examined 3 more recent Maxtor drives, and each of them had the following. The output is from some code that I wrote to query the drives according to the ATA standard, because I didn't find any off the shelf software which did this.

--------------------------------------------------------
Acoustic Management - supported
Acoustic Management - enabled
Acoustic Management - recommended value: 192
Acoustic Management - active value: 254
--------------------------------------------------------

254 is the same as FEh from the ATA standard, which specifies "max performance".

The drives I tested were
Drive Model Number________________: Maxtor 6L300S0
Drive Controller Revision Number__: BANC1G10
Drive Model Number________________: Maxtor 6B300S0
Drive Controller Revision Number__: BANC1E00
Drive Model Number________________: Maxtor 6Y120P0
Drive Controller Revision Number__: YAR41BW0

6Y120P0 is a 120GB ATA drive, and I was able to run AMSet on it, and it confirmed that the value FEh=254, "max performance" in the standard, corresponds to Maxtor AMSet's "FAST" setting.

So as it stands, IMO, all of this a pain to investigate with very little payoff. Maxtor drives currently ship with the "max performance" setting, as they obviously should, and we shouldn't have to worry about it any more.

The standard also implies that Maxtor's "recommended" value, C0h=192, could also correspond to "max performance" in Maxtor's implementation.

[Adrian Wong]

Hello Madwand,

Yeah, one problem about the AMSET utility is that it was designed to support only a few hard drive controllers and definitely not external IDE controllers, even those built-in.