Samsung F4 firmware updated, ETools questions

I am building a "low power server" using a combo deal i3-550 and freebie Gigabyte GA-H55M-S2H board. A while back I bought three 2TB Samsung F4 drives for media storage, tonight I updated their firmware. I'll use a laptop drive for the OS.

When I run Samsung ES Tools it shows that SMART is now disabled on the drives. It seems like a good idea, but I have no idea if there is a large performance hit. Would you enable it?

There is also an option for setting for AAM (automatic acoustic mode) with choices fast, middle, quiet, disable. It was set on disable, I changed it to fast. Does anyone know if there is a big difference in settings?

Thanks!!

Jim

Smart was not disabled on any of the 3 F4s that I installed the updated firmware. However I never ran ES tools. SMART works just as it did before the update except it does not randomly ignore writing back 64 sectors from the cache..

I'm getting a new PSU and RAM today. When I update, I'll try and run some benchmarks and see what the settings actually accomplish.

SMART has no effect on performance.

There are a few reports if you abuse SMART by checking the SMART every second or so you will have seriously degraded performance. There was a thread where a user had a very bad HT Tune graph and it ended up being caused by some hard drive monitering program that kept asking for smart status every 2 seconds.