Hdparm and Acoustic Management : problem

[Vincent Trouilliez]

Hi,

I am trying to use hdparm to set the "acoustic management" feature of my
IDE disk drives ( "-M" option), to put them in "quiet" mode, as the
heads are too noisy to my taste during disk accesses.

It works fine for one of the drives, a Maxtor Diamond, but when I try it
on the other drive, a Seagate "Barracuda 7200.7", it fails and hdparm
reports this error:

"HDIO_DRIVE_CMD:ACOUSTIC failed: Input/output error"

hdparm -I does NO report that acoustic management is supported, but it
does say that it is currently set to 0, and that the recommended value
is 128 (quiet).
I can't quite believe that it's not supported, especially since I have a
similar drive Seagate Barracuda, but an older series, which already had
this feature, and it worked.

The disk is nearly brand new (2 or 3 months old max) and otherwise works
fine, and smart doesn't detect any problem with the drive, so I am
hoping it's a problem with hdparm and it's fixable...

So if anyone has a similar drive "Barracuda 7200.7", could you try "sudo
hdparm -M 128 /dev/<yourdrive>", do you get the same error I get, or
does it work ?

Also, if it's a problem with hdparm, is there some other program I could
use to set the acoustic management of the drive ? 
Even it's a Windows program it's okay, as I have WinXP on the machine as
well.

Thank you so very much for any help...

--
Vince