quietHDD Alternatives

quietHDD

About:
Do you own a a a Netbook, Laptop or a Computer with an with a hard disk?
Well, then you perhaps noticed an annoying click sound that comes from time to time.

That's the reason I wrote quietHDD. A very small Windows application (~60 KBytes) that eliminates this sound. After some time spent on developing more and more useful functions were created, but it still is - and will ever be - a small utility to reduce noise.
quietHDD is the succsessor of eeeHDD. I noticed that more and more people using eeeHDD on non ASUS Laptops/Netbooks so I renamed
eeeHDD to quietHDD and added some more stuff like a user configurable GUI, AAM and so on.

Features:

Small (about 60KB)
Does not eat CPU time and uses a very small amout of RAM
Functional and responsive but powerfull, GUI and non-GUI usage possibe through command line interface
Modifies or disables the Advanced Power Management (APM) feature setting of the primary harddrive depending on powered and battery state
Modifies the Automatic Acoustic Management (AAM) feature setting of the primary harddrive depending on powered and battery state
Works with almost any modern PATA and SATA harddrive
Compatibility: Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 200x, Windows Vista

Some background:
The click sound is produced by the Seagate hard drive of my eeePC 1000H (Seagate ST9160827AS).
When idle, the drive wants to park the heads because the Advanced Power Management (APM) of the hard drive is activated by default every time the drive motor spins up after suspend. This APM park feature produces the really annoying sound.

Now, whenever the system starts, wakes up from suspend or hibernate the drives APM is activated. The click sound comes back again and again.

This little tool just sits in the sys-tray and will recognize when the system wakes up from suspend or hibernate and disable the drives APM feature. That's all.