Could Windows 7 be treating IDE as AHCI?

[doylekm]

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.

 

[windrider]

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.

I think you have to check the BIOS to see if your running the drive in AHCI mode.. I could be wrong.
Unless you want to hot swap, and some say a bit more performance, I would just leave it in IDE mode

As for the Automatic acoustic Management, when I look in 'Everest Ultimate Edition', it shows that as enabled on my hdd's.
No software is needed that I know of.

Was your drive noisy right from the start? There may be other issues going on with the drive.
Or uninstall the free software you installed, and see if that makes a difference.
I would download Hitachi diagnostic tool and run it. See what it tells you.

 

[doylekm]

Thanks

Thanks for your reply. I tried some of the things you suggested. The BIOS shows IDE mode and I'm now convinced that this is correct. I did some more investigation into the drive and I had one thing wrong - the drive is a 7K1000.C not a 7K2000 series. According to what I have read elsewhere it seems that this drive does not support AAM. That seems to be confirmed after running three different disc diagnostic tools against it (WinAAM, HDDscan and Hitachi's Feature Tool). All show the AAM feature as not supported (in contrast to my other HDD, a Hitachi 7K1000.B model). I've read one opinion that the 1000.C model is permanently set to low noise (equivalent to AAM 128) - but I can't find any official statement to this effect. I've now placed the drive in a silencing case and this has reduced it to a tolerable level. Thanks again for your suggestions.