Most of the gurus here would already know about AAM (Automatic Acoustic Management), a feature used in modern hard drives to reduce noise at the expense of reduced performance.
The effect of AAM is reflected in the Random Access Times in HDD. There is a very noticeable performance boost, especially on fragmented and filled up hard disks.
Earlier, people used to depend on third party tools like HDDScan, HDparam or a bootable diskette of the Hitachi Feature Tool to tweak the AM settings, but there is a better method if you are using Windows.
The difficult part being that you need the appropriate SATA-RAID and IDE drivers for your motherboard.
By default, the SATA-RAID drivers installed by Vista for your motherboard are generic and optimized for maximum compatibility. That doesn't mean that there are no better drivers available. Sometimes, vendor sites have an updated and better performing driver available. But mostly, you need to depend on the enthusiast community for the most robust, stable and best performing modded drivers, which may unlock hidden features you never new existed!
If like me, you have an nforce based motherboard, nForcersHQ comes to the rescue. Thanks to Fernando1 for compiling the excellent driverpacks and TwL for benchmarking them, currently the best SATA-RAID and IDE drivers for the nForce platform are Fernandos_Vista_32bit_Actual_NF4-7_Driverpack_v3.0 and Fernandos_XP_32bit_WHQL_Performance_Pack_v3.0.
Source:
actual Vista (32/64bit) driver packs for NF4-7 chipsets
It would be a good idea if you handpick the drivers most appropriate to your system.
To maximize performance of your Hard disk, make sure DMA is enabled and it is running under the best supported mode.
Next in the driver policies of your HDD, enable advanced performance setting.
Warning:
If you install the wrong drivers, you may corrupt your RAID array and risk losing all the data on your hard disk. Always backup your settings before attempting any such risky tweak.
If your drive supports it, and you have the corresponding driver installed (commonly this is disabled in the stock drivers), in computer management console > IDE/ATA Controllers > enable command queuing (NCQ) and AAM. An AAM setting of 254 (your computer would probably BSOD if you choose 255) corresponds to best performance and 0 to lowest noise (Default is 128).
Those on intel based sytems have Intel® Application Accelerator for tuning AAM.
With AAM at 254, the seek times on my WD6400AAKS reduced by 5ms to 12.5 ms, without any discernible noise.
