After a radio silence campaign by Seagate, visitors are reporting they have successfully retrieved new firmware from Seagate which is able to update their drives with AAK-firmware, which allegdly offer lower performance than its non-AAK cousins.

The new firmware is dubbed AAM and is currently only available for 500GB models of the Seagate 7200.10 series hard drive. The part number or P/N should end with numbers 308.

The new firmware reportedly successfully removes the performance cap on read throughput, like when measuring with HDTune. It is, however, entirely possible that the new firmware attempts to mask shortcomings of the System on a Chip-chip present on AAK drives, and that those shortcomings are still present, decreasing realistic I/O performance undetectable by utilities like ATTO, HDTune, HDTach and others. Anyone care to use IOmeter for a head-to-head test?

Links:
Forum post made by skystrikerx containing links and info.
Seagate's AAK firmware (article)

Caution: i have not tested the firmware myself, and backup the drive before updating!