Re: how to get a silent harddisk?
Tom Allison said:
> Jacob Anawalt wrote:
>> Joachim Förster said:
>>
>>>Does anybody know, why squid uses the harddisk although its (empty disk
>>>cache, logs and other status files are on the tmpfs)?
>>>
>> I don't know why it uses the hard disk, but if it is only reading those
>> files and there is enough memory that they are cached in the kernel file
>> cache, then perhaps the atime is being updated and that is causing the
>> disk to spin up?
>>
>> Are you mounting with the noatime option?
>>
>> Maybe there's another http proxy that doesn't require any disk access?
>>
>> I am interested in following this thread. I would like to set up a
>> similar
>> computer, with as few fans and spinning drives (zero would be ideal) as
>> possible while staying inexpensive and low-power.
>>
>
> For starters, consider via's eden PC's. Most of them are fanless.
> Then look at the hard drives that are out their with Fluid Bearings.
> Seagate is one, I think there a japanese company (Fujitsu or something)
> that
> also has very low noise hard drives.
>
> If you are rich and demanding, get a Solid State Hard Drive.
Well, I don't qualify in the first category (at least enough to justify
solid state hard drives) and I try not to be demanding. :)
The via eden PC's look promising. I've been looking at them for a while. I
had looked into PC104 a couple of years ago, but I've decided I'm not
really interested in going that route. Maybe some day.
I need to qualify my "zero would be ideal" statement. I would like it to
be silent when not in use*. When in use I am fine with hard disk noise.
The Seagate or other fluid bearing/quite drives would be very nice when
the system is being used, but still my hope is to not be spinning them all
night long, no matter how quiet they are.
For me, squid disk access while someone on my internal network is using
the proxy is not an issue. If squid were spinning up the drive when
'nothing'* is happening, calling sync()/fsync() for some odd reason then
that would be annoying. I'm running a gateway w/ squid right now, but I
haven't tried to stop the disk from spinning when squid is running.
I am unclear from Joachim's email if Squid is spinning up the disk all the
time for him, every x seconds, or only when the proxy is being used. If
it's only the latter then for my needs that's OK.
It still seems odd if writes are spinning up the drive with the read only
setting. Maybe some file squid wants to read keeps being dropped from file
cache between accesses because other programs or more frequently accessed
files are using all the memory? (Ie, because squid is set to use XMb in
memory, is there still enough free memory to cache all the files squid
wants to read. Add to that all other running program's requirements.)
If I just wanted quiet a firewall and router, I'd go with some netgear
router or similar device. The LRP (www.linuxrouter.org) seemed to be
moving towards doing basically what these ~ $50.00 (U.S.) devices do. It's
a 'Debian based' distro, but didn't have support for squid documented on
the site. Joachim, you could try LRP, but load everything into memory from
your hd instead of from a floppy.
I want a full-fledged x86 'standard hardware' Debian system that I can
access via ssh, http(s) and that will provide firewalling, port
forwarding, web proxy, sql database, dns cache, internal dns, and internal
dhcp (which is what I have) while being being energy concious during use*
and using even less power and being silent when not in active use*.
I don't want to throw my logs into a tempfs, I want yesterday's logs if I
have a power outage today. I just don't want logging spinning up the disk
every twenty minutes all night long, but I'm not interested (yet) in
logging to flash media.
noflushd seems to be a good step in that direction. I'll try it out.
Thanks for mentioning it in the first post. I've read more about it and
see that it's suppose to buffer those atime writes, so sorry about that
bad guess.
I know there are solutions for that and I've read over them. I just
haven't put a lot of time into implementing them, mainly because my
gateway machine still makes a lot of noise when my disks are spun down. I
want to tackle that first - and will probably go with a VIA CPU based
system when I do. I am a little concerned about the chipsets on newer
systems being supported by Stable, because I think I'd like to take
advantage of the power management subsystems. I'll keep doing legwork,
just wanted to share what I'm looking for incase someone has already done
it or is also interested in the same setup.
Some related sites I've looked at:
http://www.agol.dk/quietlinux/
http://www.linuxrouter.org/
http://people.freebsd.org/~picobsd/
http://www.uclinux.org/
<others I don't remember or have access to bookmarks at the moment>
* If a user is requesting disk I/O that is not a cached read or can't be a
buffered write (sync), I don't have an issue with the drive spinning up. I
just want to minimize daemon/cron file I/O without completely removing the
hard disk from the picture. If I loose four hours of --MARK-- or even 4K
of iptables logging, to make the computer silent overnight, that is what
I'm willing to risk.
--
Jacob
Trying out SquirrelMail
Reply to: