Hdparm and Acoustic Management : problem

[email.listen at googlemail.com]

Am Thu, 13. April 2006 04:18 schrieb 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.

hdparm does not do the job for some harddisks.
For Seagate, some Hiotachi and some IBM harddisks you have to use the vendor 
tools. You may download this tools from the vendors support pages.

BTW. I'm using a Maxtor tool Floppy also for IBM and Hitachi drives, no 
problem yet. It seems that tis is also for the IBM and Hitachi tools floppy, 
so I was told.


regards,
Thomas