Re: What programs make disks spin up?
In your email to me, Jens B. Jorgensen, you wrote:
>
> Nathan E Norman wrote:
> >
> > I don't think this is going to work, since Linux caches the superblock
> > as well as other filesystem info. There's a daemon called bdflush,
> > which I believe has been incorporated into the kernel ... its job is to
> > flush dirty disk buffers. Since Linux multitasks, I imagine something
> > is being read from or written to the disk at pretty regular intervals
> > ..
>
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> Only **dirty** buffers need to be written to disk by bdflush. I
> nothing is writing to disk, (and nothing is reading blocks from
> disk that are not cached) then no physical disk access needs to be
> made.
True. I hear my disks spin down and up on my machine with APM running.
> > I've never heard of this bearing problem, so I have no idea if it
> > exists. However, I can tell you that we have several machines that are
> > running 24/7 with no problems whatsoever ... some of the network servers
> > have been up for years.
>
> And yet, it could exist. I for one would like to hear more about
> this unsubstantiated rumor.
Drives that are kept cool have no problem. Older drives that may heat
up well will have spin problems. We have our news box with 8 barracuda
2 gig drives. To get the system to boot after we power it down for
more that a few mins (things start to cool), we literally have to
kick or pound the side of the case as soon as we poer it on to get the
drives to spin back up. It seems like the grease starts to get sticky
with age and heat. Seagate has confirmed this.
Tim
--
(work) sailer@bnl.gov / (home) tps@buoy.com - http://www.buoy.com/~tps
"Very Pete Townshendish." "Who?" "Exactly."
-- Anon
** Disclaimer: My views/comments/beliefs, as strange as they are, are my own.**
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