Hey all,

I recently replaced my two 7200RPM Western Digital hard drives with a Seagate Barracuda ATA-V in an effort to reduce noise and make the computer more adequate for recording. It seemed like a new drive would be a much wiser purchase than a couple of SmartDrive enclosures, and I turned out to be right. While the WD drives emit a very loud whine in a system with quiet fans, the Seagate has no idle noise at all that I can hear.

On the other hand, I have found seek noise to be increased quite a bit. While the WD drives were loud in an idle state, when they were reading and writing I heard nothing but a very low-pitched rumble. But, I have found the Barracuda to be fairly loud when active. I'm very happy with the performance increase (I have benchmarked the drive as being quite a bit faster than what I had before), but not the noise. It doesn't bother me at all compared to the "jet engine sound" of the WD drives, but on the other hand, I don't want a microphone to pick it up when recording.

I've been thinking about picking up a rubber band enclosure for the drive to see if the vibrations go away, but in the meantime, I read the datasheet for the drive. It does seem to have some sort of acoustic management, because the datasheet lists two specifications for sound levels - "quiet seek" and "performance seek". However, I couldn't find any mention on Seagate's website for how to toggle between the two modes. So am I reading this correctly, or is there in fact no acoustic management that can be enabled or disabled?

I would assume that it's in performance mode now, considering that it's faster than my other drives (which were also 7200RPM, but were models from a couple generations ago), and if there's another mode to try, I'd like to.