Kiko Piris schrieb:
The "problem" in spinning down disks are disk reads. They can not be delayed (as disk writes are by laptop-mode). So, what you have to do is to tune the daemons you have on your system so they do not do unnecessary disk reads. A typical example is postfix checking the queue every few seconds, or ntpd writing its statistics. This article has some good points for tuning these things in an iBook (or another kind of laptop): http://bulmalug.net/body.phtml?nIdNoticia=1511
This article only explains how to gather global statistics about filesystem reads with vmstat. Do you know if there is a tool to identify processes that read from disk? Something like per process vmstat would be needed to identify the process to blame for the read. Vmstat is kind of useless in this case, because if the disk spins up I know that some process is reading from it. gaudenz