Re: Meaningless to spin down the harddisk
On Mon, 12 Jun 2000, Anthony Campbell wrote:
> On 12 Jun 2000, Anders Torger wrote:
> >
> > I would like to spin down the harddisk (hdparm -Y) to save battery power, but
> > it has turned out to be meaningless, since the harddisk is accessed in a
> > fairly periodical manner, about 5 times a minute. So, if I spin down the disk
> > (hdparm -Y /dev/hda) the disk starts running again in about ten seconds, even
> > if the swap is turned off, and only the very basic processes are running.
> >
> > Is it normal that the disk is accessed so often, or do I have a configuration
> > problem? Is it the filesystem (ext2) causing the accesses? Is there a solution,
> > or is it impossible to have the disk in sleep mode for long periods of time in
> > Linux? My kernel is 2.2.14.
>
> Have a look at /etc/init.d/checkroot.sh and see how often /sbin/update
> is running (I think the default is 5 seconds. The man page for update
> explains about altering this.
>
> If this isn't what is doing it, run top and see if there is anything
> else running that keeps accessing the disk.
Ahh, I've booted in single user mode, and I've realised that it is the kernel
daemons that are accessing the disk, kupdate, kswapd, kflushd. I wonder if they
are possible to configure...
--
/Anders Torger
"Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa"
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