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Re: What programs make disks spin up?



I don't think this is going to work, since Linux caches the superblock
as well as other filesystem info.  There's a daemon called bdflush,
which I believe has been incorporated into the kernel ... its  job is to
flush dirty disk buffers.  Since Linux multitasks, I imagine something
is being read from or written to the disk at pretty regular intervals
..

I've never heard of this bearing problem, so I have no idea if it
exists.  However, I can tell you that we have several machines that are
running 24/7 with no problems whatsoever ... some of the network servers 
have been up for years.

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On 24 Jun 1997, Andy Spiegl wrote:

:Hi!
:
:I just managed to find a tool (actually it's a kernel patch) that
:allows my SCSI disks to spin down when they are idle for more than
:a specified time.
:This works great for my WINDOS disk which is hardly used while I
:run Linux, but it doesn't work at all for the disk where the
:Linux partitions are installed on. (Yes, I got 2 2GB SCSI disks)
:
:Now I am wondering what programs keep it busy all the time.  In
:the mini-FAQ of the kernel patch I read that the cron daemon,
:at, sendmail are good candidates.  But are there any more?
:Is it worth creating a ramdisk for /tmp so that at doesn't
:use the disk, changing all cron jobs so they run almost at the
:same time, and possibly patching sendmail?  Or how else can I
:tell sendmail not to try to send out my mail every 15 minutes?
:I am only online once every night to get new mail, news etc.,
:so it doesn't make sense for sendmail to try that often anyway.
:
:Is there anyone out there who has gone through all this trouble?
:
:Thanks a lot in advance for any pointers!
: Andy.
:
:PS: In case anybody wonders why I want to spin down my disks,
:    I asked around quite a bit and came to the conclusion that
:    I rather risk reaching the maximum spin-up number of my
:    disks (which is very high) than risking that my disks
:    won't spin up anymore after a system shutdown for repair,
:    hardware upgrade or whatever.  For, I read that when a disk
:    has been running for a very long time it sort of dug a ditch
:    into the ball bearing.  And when it spins up after a shutdown
:    chances are high it won't find that 'ditch' or stumbles across
:    it and fails.
:____________________________________________________________________
: Andy Spiegl, PhD Student, Technical University, Muenchen, Germany
: E-Mail: spiegl@Appl-Math.TU-Muenchen.de
: URL:    http://www.appl-math.tu-muenchen.de/~spiegl
: PGP fingerprint: B8 48 24 7B DB 96 6F 1C  D9 6D 8E 6C DB C2 E7 E9
:                                o      _     _         _
:  --------- __o       __o      /\_   _ \\o  (_)\__/o  (_)
:  ------- _`\<,_    _`\<,_    _>(_) (_)/<_    \_| \   _|/' \/
:  ------ (_)/ (_)  (_)/ (_)  (_)        (_)   (_)    (_)'  _\o_
: ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
:
:
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