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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.rmit.EDU.AU!goanna.cs.rmit.edu.au!news.apana.org.au!cantor.edge.net.au!news.teragen.com.au!news.access.net.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!news.maxwell.syr.edu!news.apfel.de!fu-berlin.de!irz401!orion.sax.de!uriah.heep!news From: j@uriah.heep.sax.de (J Wunsch) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.os.linux.misc Subject: Re: disk auto power-off problem Date: 2 Mar 1997 22:37:38 GMT Organization: Private BSD site, Dresden Lines: 32 Message-ID: <5fcvfi$jd@uriah.heep.sax.de> References: <5f32on$5mg$1@scream.auckland.ac.nz> Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.heep.sax.de Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Newsreader: knews 0.9.6 X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:36455 comp.os.linux.misc:162304 peter@scitec.auckland.ac.nz (Peter Dobcsanyi) wrote: > If there is no disk activity the disk turns off after the timeout but > then it spins up again within a few seconds and keep doing this > switching off/on all the time. I tried to get rid off system processes I > suspected regularly doing something on disk (for example cron, I guess, > it reads in every minutes) with no luck. Also I tried to mount with > nosync(?). Use of APM package didn't make a difference either. You must analyze this further. My notebook usually turns on the disk after between 15 and 30 minutes while its idle -- and that's _with_ running cron. (Cron examines directory timestamps, but since all directory IO has to go through the kernel, it can used cached filesystem metadata to get at this information.) You might want to turn on process accounting if you don't know what's the reason. One thing however: while you're typing anything on the machine, you're starting to suffer from one thing inherent to Unix: the timestamps for the tty you're typing on will regularly get updated. This will cause disk activity all the time you're typing. The only useful way out of this dilemma is DEVFS, but that's unfortunately not yet ready for the masses. (It's a kind of memory filesystem, so there won't be any disk activity to update the tty timestamps.) -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)