Maxtor's Acoustic Management technology aims to reduce the seek noises by a very simple and direct method - reduce the seek speed. By reducing the seek speed, they can actually reduce the noise level of the drive to the point that it will only be a single dBA louder when seeking. Now, that's really some reduction in noise level...

But as you can probably guess, this reduces the seek performance. Thankfully, Maxtor provides a utility that allows you to set and change the levels of acoustic management. Although this utility has been out for quite some time, I didn't really take note of it until the Maxtor page dedicated to it was recently updated. While checking to see what's been changed, I noticed that Maxtor, by default, enabled acoustic management for all shipping acoustic management-equipped drives. This means all Maxtor drives that came with acoustic management have had their seeks slowed down right from the factory!

Immediately, I downloaded the utility and tried to test the effects of Acoustic Management on my Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 drive. Unfortunately, after running a whole slew of tests on the Plus 40, I discovered that this latest version 3.2 of Maxtor's AMSET utility (released 23/10/2000) which controls the level of Acoustic Management would not support the Plus 40 UMDA/66 drive! It claims that the Plus 40 UDMA/66 does not support Acoustic Management. I could have sworn that an earlier version supported my drive. Ah well... all the work down the drain...

I consulted Maxtor about it and true enough they confirmed that my Plus 40 drive does not support acoustic management. Although the Plus 40 was mentioned as a supported drive in an earlier list (pre-September 23rd list), Maxtor said that the list was wrong. Only Plus 40 drives that support ATA/100 supports acoustic management.

There are two variants of Plus 40 hard disks. The older ones, with a U tag in the model number, have UDMA/66 controller boards that do not support acoustic management. But newer drives come with newer UDMA/100 controller boards that have the acoustic management technology built-in. These drives have a H tag.

In addition, they also informed me that what was mentioned on Maxtor's site as their Acoustic Management is actually called the Silent Store technology. However, I'm not sure if Silent Store is what they have been calling the AMSET technology all along and not just something they just made up after all the sudden interest in AMSET. :)

Silent Store

According to Maxtor, their Silent Store technology gives PC manufacturers the option of selecting whether to run the hard disks at maximum performance or with the lowest noise level possible. This provides them (PC manufacturers) with maximum flexibility when building their systems because there will be times when they need a drive that's suitable for noise-sensitive environments.

Currently, only these drive models are supported :-

• Maxtor DiamondMax 60
• Maxtor DiamondMax VL 30
• Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 40 UDMA/100
• Maxtor DiamondMax 60 UDMA/100
• Maxtor DiamondMax VL 30 UDMA/100

Maxtor's AMSET utility allows you to set any of the following acoustic management levels :-

• Quiet - seeks are slowed down so that seek acoustics are brought to within 1 dBA of idle acoustics. This AM level allows Maxtor drives that support this Silent Store technology to accommodate noise-sensitive storage environments.
• Fast - seeks are slightly slowed down in order to reduce the seek acoustics but with the least amount of impact on drive performance
• Off - acoustic management is turned off for normal acoustic and performance levels.

Please note that while Maxtor quote specifications with Silent Store disabled, your hard disk is normally shipped with Silent Store set to Quiet. This means that your Maxtor DiamondMax hard disk is actually under performing! You may right in that your DiamondMax hard disk has an average seek time of less than 9 ms. But that's only on paper. In truth, because Maxtor set the acoustic management level to Quiet, your DiamondMax drive will actually be running with a longer seek time out of the box!