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Re: (for gurus) a process access HDD



Mohammad Halawah wrote:

I am using the " hdparm -S 1 /dev/hda" command to keep the HDD quite while I am reading some pdf's

but the problem is that there is a process running and ask for data from the HDD which reactivate the HDD again and I am losing the "quietness"

I think what you really need is the package 'laptop-mode-tools', which in my opinion should work with any computer.

It modifies your hdparms and kernel parameters so that lazy flushing of buffers occur.

Read the very useful document /usr/share/doc/laptop-mode-tools/laptop-mode.txt.gz, there is a method described how to examine the processes which read or write data to disk.

Citation:

If you want to find out which process caused the disk to spin up, you can gather information by setting the flag /proc/sys/vm/block_dump. When this flag is set, Linux reports all disk read and write operations that take place, and all block dirtyings done to files. This makes it possible to debug why a disk needs to spin up, and to increase battery life even more. The output of block_dump is written to the kernel output, and it can be retrieved using "dmesg". When you use block_dump and your kernel logging level also includes kernel debugging messages, you probably want to turn off klogd, otherwise the output of block_dump will be logged, causing disk activity that is not normally there.



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