Automatic acoustic management (AAM) is a method for reducing acoustic emanations in AT Attachment (ATA) mass storage devices for computer data storage, such as ATA hard disk drives and ATAPI optical disc drives.
Although there is no definition of the function implemented to provide acoustic management in the ATA standard, most drives use power control of the head-positioning servo to reduce vibration induced by the head positioning mechanism.
Western Digital provides a demonstration flash movie illustrating just-in-time head positioning on their web site.
To provide best acoustic performance, some drive manufacturers may limit the maximum seek velocity of the heads for AAM operation.
This degrades performance by increasing the average seek time: some head movements are forced to wait an additional disk rotation before accessing data because the head was unable to move to the target position during the first rotation due to velocity limits.