Re: Hard disk won't spin down; what's accessing it?
Kevin McKinley, 2003-May-01 12:16 -0400:
> On Wed, 30 Apr 2003 17:44:57 -0400
> Brian Kendig <brian@enchanter.net> wrote:
>
> > I have my laptop's hard drive spindown timeout (hdparm -S) set to two
> > minutes, but the hard drive never spins down. I figure this is because
> > there's some process hitting it more often than every two minutes.
> >
> > But I can't figure out what process is responsible for this. It's not
> > the system logs; those aren't being written to that often.
> >
> > How do I find out what process is making disk accesses and keeping it
> > from spinning down?
>
> If you're using a journalled file system (ext3, Reiserfs, JFS, XFS) that's
> one reason.
>
> By default ext3 writes changes to the drive every five seconds. I don't know
> about the commit interval for the other filesystems.
I was told that by mounting the ext3 partitions with the "noatime"
option, the disk access every "five" seconds doesn't happen. It seems
to work for me. My disk spins down using noflushd and stays down for
hours when not in use.
I had to make some changes to exim as well so that it doesn't do queue
runs every few minutes.
jc
--
Jeff Coppock Systems Engineer
Diggin' Debian Admin and User
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