Hitachi makes an awesome little tool that allows you to access ATA features of Hitachi HDD drives, the Feature Tool. Quoted from the Hitachi Website:

The Feature Tool is a DOS-bootable tool for changing various ATA features. It can modify certain features of our Deskstar and Travelstar high-performance ATA hard disk drives and supports 48-bit addressing for new, large-capacity drives.

One of the cool things about this little utility? It works with other manufacturer’s drives too.

Why would one need to access specific ATA features of a hard drive? I’m glad I asked myself that question, because now I’m able to tell you a little story.

After moving into a new place, we’ve had to reduce our TiVo count from two recording geniuses to one. I had previously upgraded both from 40GB to 80GB drives, but 80 just wasn’t going to cut it for the number of programs we’d like to keep at one time. Luckily I had a 200GB Western Digital drive that wasn’t being used. Time to put it to use!

The TiVo upgrade process is fairly simple with a spare PC. I keep one on retainer for this type of job. Take the drive out, slap it into the PC along with the new drive, copy the contents, put the new drive in the TiVo, and boom! You’re done.

Then the problem was noise. The 200GB drive was much noiser than the 80 (I’m sensitive to noise). It was annoying enough that I knew I must get on with fixing it. After a little searching around through a bunch of Google results, I found a post on the TiVo Community Forums talking about a Hitachi utility being able to enable AAM (automatic acoustic management) as well as it working with Western Digital drives.

Enabling AAM gets rid of the drive seek clicks. Doing this was easy. I downloaded the ISO, burned it to CD, booted it from the PC with 200GB drive attached, and ran it. Simple little DOS utility. Wonderful features. At least, wonderful in my case, as this was exactly what I needed.

This little tool, the Hitachi Feature Tool made my drive much quieter, and my wife and I much happier.

THANK YOU HITACHI for the awesome Feature Tool.