What programs make disks spin up?
Hi!
I just managed to find a tool (actually it's a kernel patch) that
allows my SCSI disks to spin down when they are idle for more than
a specified time.
This works great for my WINDOS disk which is hardly used while I
run Linux, but it doesn't work at all for the disk where the
Linux partitions are installed on. (Yes, I got 2 2GB SCSI disks)
Now I am wondering what programs keep it busy all the time. In
the mini-FAQ of the kernel patch I read that the cron daemon,
at, sendmail are good candidates. But are there any more?
Is it worth creating a ramdisk for /tmp so that at doesn't
use the disk, changing all cron jobs so they run almost at the
same time, and possibly patching sendmail? Or how else can I
tell sendmail not to try to send out my mail every 15 minutes?
I am only online once every night to get new mail, news etc.,
so it doesn't make sense for sendmail to try that often anyway.
Is there anyone out there who has gone through all this trouble?
Thanks a lot in advance for any pointers!
Andy.
PS: In case anybody wonders why I want to spin down my disks,
I asked around quite a bit and came to the conclusion that
I rather risk reaching the maximum spin-up number of my
disks (which is very high) than risking that my disks
won't spin up anymore after a system shutdown for repair,
hardware upgrade or whatever. For, I read that when a disk
has been running for a very long time it sort of dug a ditch
into the ball bearing. And when it spins up after a shutdown
chances are high it won't find that 'ditch' or stumbles across
it and fails.
____________________________________________________________________
Andy Spiegl, PhD Student, Technical University, Muenchen, Germany
E-Mail: spiegl@Appl-Math.TU-Muenchen.de
URL: http://www.appl-math.tu-muenchen.de/~spiegl
PGP fingerprint: B8 48 24 7B DB 96 6F 1C D9 6D 8E 6C DB C2 E7 E9
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