On Tuesday, December 17, 2002, at 06:52 PM, Mark Williams wrote:
Thanks for your response! I added noatime to the relevant fstab line:/dev/hda11 / ext2 errors=remount-ro,noatime 0 1but the drive still clicks to life every now and then. This is no good! Will noflushd have any more luck than hdparm?
Just to check, did you restart or re-mount the drive? These options only take effect at mount time. How often does the drive click? On mine, which had a Toshiba drive in it, I'd hear it click as the heads parked about once every five seconds before making the changes. If it's not a regular five-ish seconds, what type of things are you doing when the drive runs? Are there any processes running that might be causing it?
noflushd is a different approach to hdparm. From what I remember from the noflushd readme, the kernel has a set of disk block buffers in it. These buffers become dirty, i.e. out of date, whenever a process tries to write to disk. If it's a small write then these dirty buffers are allowed to build up until they are flushed out to the disk, which I think normally happens every five seconds. noflushd inhibits this automatic flush, leaving the dirty buffers in memory and letting the disk spin down.
-- Michael
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