WD 5000AAKS in external enclosure with Mac (AAM?)

hmai18 · Post by **hmai18** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 3:43 am

I ordered a the WD drive a few days ago to be used in an external enclosure for Time Machine backups and for my iTunes library.

Is there a way to enable AAM through OSX or a 3rd party application? My old silenced Athlon system is still in my closet, but I'm not sure I have SATA cables for the mobo anymore. If I enabled AAM through the BIOS and then transfered the drive to the enclosure, would the settings stick?

ilh · Post by **ilh** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 5:12 am

I'm not sure how you enable AAM in the BIOS, but AAM settings are stored on the drive itself, so if you can set them from the other machine the settings should stick.

If this is an Intel Mac, I wonder if you can boot something like an Ubuntu Live CD and change AAM on the drive using "sudo hdparm -M 128 /dev/sdaX". I've done this many times on PCs.

hmai18 · Post by **hmai18** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 5:37 am

Unfortunately, it's a G4 iBook. Would booting from the Ubuntu CD still work on a PPC machine?

kel · Post by **kel** » Tue Apr 01, 2008 9:43 am

Newer Ubuntu distro's don't seem to support PPC anymore, but you can always give it a try with 6.06 (i.e. from http://mirror.switch.ch/ftp/mirror/ubuntu-cdimage/6.06/ or another ubuntu mirror => http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/downloadmirrors ).
You can definetly boot it on a powerpc (done so on my powerbook g4 in the past), but what I don't know is wether hdparm fully works on powerpc macs or not...

Edit: 6.10 also still supports powerpcs: http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/edgy/