LilPeter

I'm glad your drive works as expected. Strange that it comes with a different default APM preset than mine. By the way, how do you access the DCO? I myself have only been able to change the APM through Sentinel and nothing else.

Good luck with your drive j7n. You won't be disappointed. Interesting that the manual says that. I wonder what the advertised "advanced power profiles" would be then. Or how to select them.

Hello j7n, I registered just to answer your question because your question is what I should have probably asked before buying. I just learned about APM with this hard disk and I found this thread while searching for information about it. Here is my experience after 2 days of use. The drive is very silent even in my computer case, which is the classic metallic type that resonates with vibration. I can slightly hear the drive only if I move very close to my computer, and it's not the chirping or annoying type of noise even at that distance. Even when reading or writing data it is pretty much silent. About APM, the drive does have it, but it remembers when you change the setting so you can disable it permanently with Hard Disk Sentinel (even the evaluation version) or other software. Use 4.40 or newer though, or it won't show you the real current value after restarting. Anyway the time it was enabled, APM didn't have an impact on performance or acoustics at all. The comeback from the power saving state was seamless. So besides seeing the S.M.A.R.T. values (Load/Unload and the like, that did increase in those first hours) I don't even know if the heads were parked or if something else changed during that time. So I only changed it for -possible- durability, though according to Seagate the drive has a rating of 600,000 Load/Unload cycles, so even that wouldn't be much of a concern if you want to try the feature. Anything else, just ask.