[ltp] Hard drive sound/noise

[Matt Graham]

On Monday 16 April 2007 15:41, after a long battle with technology, 
Fredrik Wendt wrote:
> Tino Keitel wrote:
> > What filesystem did you use before? Maybe ext2? And now ext3 in
> > Etch? Then it may be the ext3 journal that is written every 5
> > seconds per default.
> This is _so_ annoying. Is there a way to disable this write-through
> stuff?

If you disabled journal commits, it wouldn't be a journalling FS, would 
it?  You can mount an ext3 filesystem as ext2 without borking it, 
natch, but you'll have to wait for it to fsck if there's an unplanned 
shutdown.  You can also put "ext3.commit=1800" in your kernel command 
line to make the journal commits happen every 1800 seconds instead of 
every 5.  This may work better for people who don't want their disks to 
spin up that often.

> hdparm -y /dev/sda makes my day - for a few seconds.
> Is there anything I can do, except go back to ext2?

Your filesystems are mounted with "noatime", right?  Do that if you can.  
atime records are useless for many users, and turning them off speeds 
things up a little bit and reduces disk access.

> Are there any really silent disks I could replace the current
> (FUJITSU MHV2080B  Rev: 0084) with, to get out of this "ticking bomb
> sound" I'm bringing wherever I go..

You don't want to stop the periodic "tick-tick-tick" sound some disks 
make.  That's the disk recalibrating its head to account for temp 
changes.  If the noise is constant, something's sort of wrong.  Or you 
could try hdparm -M 128 /dev/sda.  (Or you need to put some Swedish 
death metal in and crank the speakers....)

-- 
   ...they believe if something can't be proven to exist, it shouldn't
   exist.  They have an elegant proof that smoking piles of rubble exist
   and are fond of invoking it.  --Triangle & Robert
There is no Darkness in Eternity/But only Light too dim for us to see