[ltp] HDD access avery 5 seconds?

[Richard Neill]

Tino Keitel wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 14:46:34 +0100, Richard Neill wrote:
>> Dear All,
>>
>> My TP seems to access the HDD about once ever 5 seconds, even when it  
>> should be "idle". It makes a quiet tick, and the HDD light flickers.
>> It's annoying if I leave the machine on while I'm asleep, and it also  
>> prevents the HDD from ever spinning down to save power.
>>
>> Any thoughts what it could be?
> 
> Ext3 journal flush.
> 
> You can set a different journal flush interval using the "commit" mount
> option.

Thanks - that's very useful. Just one thing puzzles me: why would ext3 
flush the journal at all if the machine is idle; if no files have been 
modified during that period, surely there's no data, nor updates to the 
  journal to be saved to disk?

Richard