Re: who is r/w-ing my hdd?
Matthias Pfeifer wrote:
Jochen Schulz <ml@well-adjusted.de> wrote in news:5unNS-8tn-23@gated-
at.bofh.it:
Matthias:
I am searching the source of some every 2/3 seconds
happening harddisk read/write operation.
If you are using a journalling file system like ext3, this is normal and
shouldn't stress your hard disk.
J.
How is that? And how does that correspond to my
observation that it must be the x-window-system
that is taking a role in this situation? Can
you explain, please?
I can think of at least three things that may cause or affect this behavior,
either alone or in combination:
1) kupdated, and I don't know where the docs are, but it's mentioned in passing here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mukesh/hacks/spindown/t1.html#FTN.AEN27
2) Disk(s) mounted with atime updates enabled, which I think is the default.
This means that even frequent periodic reads from the file cache will still result
in disk write access each time. Since you probably don't need atime updates enabled
(not sure about journalling FS's), it's probably safe to disable atime updates using the
the noatime option of mount.
3) Just a guess, but some periodic housekeeping by your filesystem. See your FS docs.
I agree with the previous poster that hardware stress is not an issue with a hard
disk, although I've read of concerns about flash drives.
I don't know what the connection with X could be, but it seems plausible that it
could generate enough background activity to trigger one or more of the above
factors.
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