Re: How to minimize hard drive spin up and spin down?

[Raj Kiran Grandhi <grajkiran@gmail.com>]

Amit Uttamchandani wrote:
> Hey guys,
>
> I'm a happy camper with Debian Etch here on my old laptop. Thanks to all the
> developers and the users for the great work!
>
> Right now, I have an old laptop with a noisy harddrive. I have installed
> laptop-mode tools and set my hard drive spin down to around 20 seconds. Here is
> the sequence of action
>
>  1. Open a small text file in vim.
>  2. After 20 seconds, hd spins down.
>  3. Make a few changes in the text file (not saving it yet) -> hd spins up.
>
> I am not using X or anything. This is simply straight from the command line
> without any X.
>
> I have tried setting the noatime option but it doesn't seem to help in the above
> case. Is it something to do with vim? Maybe some autosaving feature? What about
> logs?

When you make changes to the text file, vim writes a swap file so that 
you changes can be recovered if the edit session crashes. If you wish, 
you can disable swap file by setting the 'noswapfile' option.

HTH,
Raj Kiran