[ltp] Hard disk shutdown

IBM ThinkPad linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Tue, 22 Oct 2002 20:44:19 +0200 (CEST)


On Tue, 22 Oct 2002, Ted Johansson wrote:

> *** List MOVED use linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org for future postings
> *** I have 256 MB real memory, shouldn't this be enough?
>
> Are there any major changes in the new Mandrake 9.0 that causes my
> troubles? I have not tested noflushd with another distribution.
>
>
> Regards,   Ted
>
>
>
> IBM ThinkPad wrote:
>
>  *** List MOVED use linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org for future postings ***
>
>
>
> On Sun, 20 Oct 2002, Ted Johansson wrote:
>
>
>
>  I am trying to have the hard disk stop after X min of inactivity. The
> computer is in the living room and often just left on for long time.
>
> I changed from ext3 to ext2, added the "noatime" parameter in fstab,
> also tried noflush from sourceforge with 1 min (for testing purpose)
> timeout, but the disk still only stops for a few seconds. Same if I set
> a very short timeout using hdparm.
>
> Any more suggested tricks to get this working?
>
>
>  Be sure to have enough real memory, otherwise your machine will constantly
> swap.
>
> On my machine, NOFLUSHD did a quite good job after switching back to EXT2.
>
> Best regards,
>
>  Steph
>
>
>
>
>
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Dear Ted,

ensure that there aren't any unnecessary daemons like crond, sendmail,
ftpd running.
A non-journaling file system is also a must.

If you want to get the bad boy who spins up the disk, simply look in "top"
which processes have increasing accumulative cpu time. Even some megabytes
of used swap space can be a reason for a constantly running disk.

My expierience is that the drive holding the root + swap partitions is
really hard to get spinned down while the other drives happily spin down.

Find the bad boys!

Best regards,

 Stephan