[ltp] how to silence the hard drive

[Volker Krueger]

Hi,

I recently found something that I would like to share with you. It
concerns the quest of silencing the HD.
One problem is obviously that the OS keeps writing things to the HD, and
there are a number of articles that discuss different ways to deal with
that, see, e.g., laptop-mode package, etc.

However, I was never really satisfied with the results, because my HD
never kept silent for more than 30s.

Now, i discovered the following possible entries for /etc/fstab:

tmpfs /var/log tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0
tmpfs /var/tmp tmpfs defaults,noatime,mode=1777 0 0

this generates a ram-disk for each mounted tmpfs, i.e., all temporary
stuff goes into the laptop's memory so that the HD is not woken up anymore.

to enfore firefox to use /tmp, one can do the following:

*Move Firefox cache to RAM disk*
/This might not be useful if you're on a very slow modem connection and
restarts your computer very often./

    * Open Firefox.
    * Type *about:config* in the search bar.
    * Right click on any row.
    * Select *New > String* from the popup menu.
    * Add *browser.cache.disk.parent_directory* and press enter.
    * Close Firefox.


The source is for the above is:
http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=54379&highlight=linux


cheers,
Volker