Re: ext3

[Daniel Pittman <daniel@rimspace.net>]

On Sun, 9 Dec 2001, Mark Brown wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 09, 2001 at 09:02:36AM -0500, Tom Allison wrote:
> 
>> does ext3 work with notebooks in that it will still allow for drive 
>> parking and all that power saving goodness?
> 
> It'll work just fine but it'll keep the disk spinning since it writes
> to disk every so often (the frequency with which it does so is
> configurable).

...without modifying the kernel source and rebuilding. There is a
#define in one of the files that is '5 * HZ' which controls this.

You can modify that to your hearts content, if you wish. Pushing it up
to something huge means that the standard bdflush will write out data.

OTOH, there is a little cognitive dissonance in having a journaling
filesystem and keeping data in memory longer: one is to increase
reliability at the cost of performance, the other decreases reliability
in return for greater performance.[1]

        Daniel

Footnotes: 
[1]  Battery life, in this case, counts as performance. :)

-- 
You do ill to praise, but worse to censure, what you do not understand.
        -- Leonardo da Vinci