Can't make WD hard drives quieter with Asus AI Quiet motherboards
Hi all
I'm about to buy 2 500GB Western Digital WD5000AAKS drives and I've read that you can reduce (although there isn't much to start with) some of the "noise" they make by enabling AAM... but I've read over on silentpcreview that if you have an Asus motherboard with AI Quiet, you can't enable AAM. Asus have disabled it as it's "not compatible with AI Quiet motherboards".
:angst:
Does anyone have any Asus board with AI Quiet and a Western Digital drive, have you enabled AAM and got it to stay on, and how loud does it sound?
Thanks
DM
P.S. If you have a P5W-DH Deluxe motherboard and a WD5000AAKS then you have my intended setup and I would especially like to hear from you - but think it would be useful for all to know if this is relevant to all AI Quiet boards and drives.
Re: Can't make WD hard drives quieter with Asus AI Quiet motherboards
:surprised: No!! does Asus have an explanation and/or workaround for this?
I have an Asus P5K-E in a Zalman 160HD case with 2 WD500AAKS drives.
Everything is almost noiseless, no vibrations etc. but when the hard disks seek they are awfully loud!!
I'm not sure what reviewers measure when they say these drives are quiet... I mean the rotation sound (whisper) is almost null but the seek noise is much more evident than on all previous Hitachi drives I've owned...
So I though (as I've always done on all my hard drives) ok I'll enable AAM.
And I must say although still audible the drives were way quieter during the seek test with aam enabled (in the Hitachi feature tool).
But bad surprise... after reboot back to the starting point...
:telephone: I will try to contact Asus' customer support.
Re: Can't make WD hard drives quieter with Asus AI Quiet motherboards
I have 4 WD3200 RE16 (Western Digital Caviar 320gig) in Raid 0...
They on an Asus P5K-E in a NZXT Lexa case and are completely quiet!
I use my box for music production and the only noisy part is the retail fan on the CPU...
I think if you havent got the drive installed with silicon grommets between the HDD and the metal case, youll get some resonance.
For a quieter drive try the samsung spinpoints... They in my other rig and they are almost completely inaudible!
Re: Can't make WD hard drives quieter with Asus AI Quiet motherboards
Interesting... the Zalman case came with rubber pads already installed in all HD bays, it should be more than enough! I will try to look for the silicon ones... maybe the rest of the pc is so silent that the hd seek noise annoys me!
But regardless of that, I found it really bad that the major motherboard supplier in the world has built such a flaw into their newest products!
Thanks anyway!
:rolleyes: