Thinkpads Forum

I just turned on acoustic management on my T60p and it made the drive MUCH quieter. Now I can hardly hear it.

1. Download the Hitachi Feature Tool from this link: http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm

2. Follow the directions and make a bootable floppy or CD.

3. Go into BIOS and enable SATA Compatibility mode. If you don't do this, the utility can't see your hard drive

4. Boot the utility. Set acoustic management on to its fullest level

5. Go back into the BIOS and disable the SATA Compatibility mode.

I benchmarked the drive before and after the change, and the performance didn't decrease a bit. In fact, it improved after the mod but this was probably just random chance.

Edited to fix the broken link above

thanks for figuring it out. I tried that feature tool last week, but it wouldn't work. I guess I didn't turn on "compatibility" mode in the BIOS.


thanks agin

Great tool! I just wish I could adjust the setting from within Windows...

You can to some extent; in NHC, you can manage some acoustic parameters that make a significant difference to the noise made by the HDD.

Hi,

I just gotmy 2623D6U on Friday and wanted to checkout the acoustic management feature of the HD. While in the tool at some point I set the APM level to 0x01 (APM standby), because it seemed that it would mean that the HD would go into standby when idling for a while. Here's what happened though:

The HD light came on and nothing apparent happened for at least two minutes. I rebooted and since then it sounds like the HD is either trying to spin up and can't (like when you have an external HD that doesn't get enough power), or it's spinning up and immediately shutting down again. BIOS taes forever with the HD light on and after a few minutes I get two errors:
0200 HDD failure
2100 HDD initialization failure.

I tried to get back into the Hitachi utility and undo the settings but the drive doesn't appear anymore. Once it was there but said "this drive does not support this setting" whenever I tried to change anything. Does anyone have any idea what's going on and what I can do to get it back to work?

Thanks a lot!!!

are you running on batteries or the AC?


I don't know what happened, but I hope it's fixable. Otherwise call Lenovo and have them ship you another hard drive.

Actually after talking to Hitachi, I found out Hitachi knows of this error. Using the Feature Tool and changing the APM setting to one will fry the drive and this is a KNOWN ISSUE at Hitachi's engineering division!!! According the engineers even a firmware update won't fix the problem. So, be careful!
They said the next version of their Feature Tool will include a fix...

It's still safe to change the acoustic management.. Just don't touch the power management features!

I've got a fujitsu drive in my machine, are there any comparable acoustic tools?