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Set Automatic Acoustic Management level on hard drives
Authored by: mickangel on Dec 10, '05 02:17:42PM
Thanks very much for the information.

I have been playing around with "APM Tuner X". This utility is abandonware but some information is still available here:

http://web.archive.org/web/20011006043108/http://www01.u-page.so-net.ne.jp/gb3/eijim/index-E.html

On my PB 15 with Seagate (ST9808211A) drive I was getting irritating park&clunk noises every 15-20 seconds. Apparently this frequent parking is common, and does help to save energy, but the constant parking/unparking reduces the life of the hard drive and the noise is extremely irritating. I was getting head parking 4 times a minute until I started using APM Tuner X.

The rated life of the hard drive says "600,000 load/unload cycles" (seagate specs) and I had already 96865 load cycle counts for 375 power on hours. Amazingly I'd reached a sixth of the expected life of the hard drive in only 375 'on-hours'. I've emailed Seagate about this but no response so far.

The APM Tuner utility allows you to manually increase a certain APM value meaning that the incessant, frequent and irritating "clunk" of the heads parking happens less often.

For more information on the clunk&park look here:

http://macosg.com/group/viewtopic.php?t=3944&sid=bd90b603bef94e2057c610b8e772f983

The reason for asking for an explanation is I wanted to try to apply a value in open firmware to the APM register of the disk's firmware. ie: replicate what APM Tuner does but using open firmware.

It seems that the following sets the APM value:

0 0 0 here 85D300 , ef , 4000 1 apply ata-command hd .

The 85 above seems to refer to the APM entry and the D3 is 211 in decimal. 211 is the value I found that stopped the park&clunk from happening in APM Tuner.

After mac-boot from open firmware the park&clunk noise is gone and smartmontools' /usr/local/sbin/smartctl disk0 -a | grep Load_Cycle_Count reports the cycle count is now static.

.

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Set Automatic Acoustic Management level on hard drives
Authored by: mickangel on Dec 11, '05 01:23:52AM

[update to above]

bugger: the APM open firmware setting doesn't seem to survive across reboots. Oh well - back to having APM Tuner X in the startup group.





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Set Automatic Acoustic Management level on hard drives
Authored by: mickangel on Dec 12, '05 07:48:28AM

Ok, I've managed to script the APM Tuner X so that I don't have to manually set the slider and hit "Set" everytime I reboot.

As the app is not scriptable and the slider does not seem to be selectable from applescript I changed some settings in the APM Tuner X nib file so that the default value for the slider is the value I wanted, then wrote a small applescript utility to pass a 'return' keypress (which presses the "set" button).

Finally I added the script to the startup group. It seems to work: upon bootup the script runs, it opens the APM Tuner X program with the slider set to 211 by default, the sends a 'return' keypress to set the value, finally it closes the APM Tuner app.





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