MacAAM may reduce sound from "noisy" hard drives

Lukas Machata writes: "For all of you who can't stand your whiny hard drive, MacAAM is a possible solution. This little program was published in Germany a couple of days ago. It allows you to manage IDE drives that support the "Acoustic Management." It's easy to use and it won't harm anything. No documentation is included - so for those of you who don't speak German, here's what the dialog boxes say:

First window:

With this program you can set the 'Acoustic Management' of hard drives. You can define if a drive should work rather quiet (and slower) or fast (and louder). Would you like to continue? ['Cancel'] ['Continue']

Second window:

If your drive is supported: The 'Acoustic Management' for 'YourDriveModelNumber' is ... ('active' or 'inactive') and set to ... (status) ['No Change'] ['Quiet' or 'Loud'] ['Standard']

If your drive is not supported: No ATA drive found that supports 'Acoustic Management'. ['OK']

Lukas adds: "The 10GB Western Digital inside my iMac DV is unsupported. The 30GB IBM Deskstar in my new G4 supports Acoustic Management, however I can't tell any difference is sound - probably because a) the drive is new and b) the fan is louder. According to users of a German Mac Forum, this Acoustic Management feature was only available through a DOS command line until now. Also, although the program says the drive is being 'slower,' someone mentioned an amount of maybe 3%."