With the fans on my PC forever silenced in the wake of my successful water cooling experiment, the sound made by my hard disk is surprisingly grating – like a geiger counter going off as each radioactive file is read or written.

I happened to run SiSoft Sandra on my machine to see how it would report the lack of fans and I noticed something surprising; it warned me that I had Acoustic Management enabled on my ATA hard disk.

After initially thinking… “…like hell I do…”, I had to investigate this Acoustic Management. After a little digging to find out which exact disk is installed, and which driver is used to access that disk, I downloaded a diagnostic utility that would enable me to tweak things.

As it happens, about the only parameter I was able to tweak was the Acoustic Management. It wasn’t on, as SiSoft Sandra had reported; it was off.

I turned it on, wondering if it would make a difference; then waited, and waited and waited… then iIdid something to make the disks whirr.

Wow, near silence.

So now loudest sound in the room is the creak of my chair and my keyboard. The creak I’ll solve tomorrow with some WD40.