Automatic Acoustic Management

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Automatic Acoustic Management, or AAM, is a feature available in most modern hard drives, although usually disabled by default. The feature reduces the seek noise produced by hard drives, at the cost of a small performance hit.

Seagate hard drives are the most common exception as they do not feature AAM, due to a dispute they had. Some people believe that the PATA 7200.7's had AAM enabled by default, whereas the SATA (non-native) had it disabled, as the sata drives tended to be a little faster and noisier.

AAM has to be enabled by the end-user, using a software tool. Each tool works for every hard drive however, and Hitachi's Tool[1] is often used.