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Could Windows 7 be treating IDE as AHCI?
I have recently upgraded my motherboard and installed Windows 7 64-bit on a new hard drive. The drive is proving to be very noisy (it's a 500Gb Hitachi 7K2000 - model HDS721050CLA362). I had an older Hitachi 7K1000 series which was very quiet so I looked out information on the new drive. It seems that the drive supports Automatic Acoustic Management, although Hitachi's Feature Management software no longer does. I looked out a couple of Freeware alternatives to provide AAM support (WinAAM and HSS-Scan) - but both report that the drive does not support AMM. Puzzled by this I read elsewhere that drives do not support AAM when running in AHCI rather than IDE mode.
Before I installed Windows I recall puzzling over the BIOS settings for the hard drive and it may be that I installed Windows with the mode set to AHCI - I can't now remember. The current BIOS setting is definitely IDE but is is possible that Windows is treating the drives as AHCI (because of the drivers it installed)? I've read lots of information about converting Windows to treat drives as AHCI after installation as IDE, but nothing about doing the opposite.
After several house trying many things I'm at a loss as to whether to reinstall Windows (meaning another day of software installation) or whether there is some simple solution to get the drive recognised as supporting AMM.
One thing I'm not clear on is how to check which mode the drives are operating under - I've seen references to checking Device Manager - but I'm not sure what I'm looking for.
Any help would be much appreciated.
Last edited by doylekm; 30 Aug 2010 at 03:11.