Re: Mysterious drive access and battery life

[Mark Williams <mkwilliams@ucdavis.edu>]

On Tue, 17 Dec 2002 16:47:35 -0800
Michael Hope <michaelh@juju.net.nz> wrote:

> Hi Mark.  I had a fiddle with my machine a month ago, and here's what I 
> found:
> 
> 1.  Most accesses are due to updating the file access time.  Turning 
> this off gets rid of alot of redundant writes.  To turn it off, add the 
> 'noatime' flag to your fstab and either reboot or re-mount the 
> partition.
> 2.  On Ext2 and probably XFS you can use the noflushd daemon.  This 
> changes the kernel operation so that dirty data isn't flushed to the 
> hard disk unless the disk is running.  This could lead to lost data and 
> doesn't work with Ext3 or Reiser.
> 
> -- Michael
> 

Thanks for your response! I added noatime to the relevant fstab line:
/dev/hda11      /               ext2    errors=remount-ro,noatime       0       1

but the drive still clicks to life every now and then. This is no good! Will noflushd have any more luck than hdparm?

Thanks,

Mark