Re: harddisk spindown & linux

[Jack Taylor <n7oo@theriver.com>]

I had a similar problem and turned out the  power management was buggy.   I
went into cmos setup and turned this function off.

Jack

-----Original Message-----
From: Lars Bensmann <lars.bensmann@epost.de>
To: linux-dvb <linux-dvb@linuxtv.org>
Date: Monday, October 09, 2000 5:02 AM
Subject: Re: harddisk spindown & linux


Hi,

On Mon, Oct 09, 2000 at 11:04:11AM +0200, Thomas Jagoditsch wrote:
>
> after setting "hdparm -S 1" i realized my old enemy rose again
> (fought that on my answering-machine project and gave up ;-).
>
> something in linux does disk io every couple of minutes - so "-S 1"
> works not as expected and i found no way to prevent this.
> turning off all daemons (except syslogd and kerneld) showed no
> change, which subsystem is responsible for this ?

1. I haven't tried this. :-)
2. You can prepend the names of the logfiles in /etc/syslogd.conf with a
-. This should prevent syncing after every recorded message.
3. There is the following Debian package that sounds like you could like
it:

Package: noflushd
Priority: optional
Section: misc
Installed-Size: 61
Maintainer: Joey Hess <joeyh@debian.org>
Version: 1.8.5-3
Depends: libc6 (>= 2.1.2)
Architecture: i386
Size: 23694
MD5sum: 32a7b8f1366269472c282f9af37072c2
Filename: dists/woody/main/binary-i386/misc/noflushd_1.8.5-3.deb
Description: allow idle hard disks to spin down
Noflushd is a daemon that spins down disks that have not been read from
after a certain amount of time, and then prevents disk writes from
spinning them back up. It's targeted for laptops but can be used on any
computer with IDE disks. The effect is that the hard disk actually spins
down, saving you battery power, and shutting off the loudest component of
most computers.

If you don't use Debian, you can get more info about the package at
http://packages.debian.org/noflushd. The place where it was downloaded can
normally found in the copyright file. (There should be a link to it on the
page)

cu,
Lars

--
I consume, therefore I am