Johnny Fulcrum wrote:
> I have fedroa core1 on a dell latitude and have noticed a lot of hard  
> drive activity.  The hard drive LED flickers constantly (sometimes goes  
> solid on for a second or two).  I install gkrellm and there's a little  
> chart for disk activity - every second or so it'll chart disk activity.
> 
> Is there any tools or commands I can use to see what process is making the  
> HD grind ?  I looked through a ps -ef and didn't see anything too suspect  
> - I also have "turned off" uneeded services using chkconfig....

Are you using ext3 filesystem?  I had the same problem on a Thinkpad.
Didn't see any processes causing the disk activity.  Turned out it was 
ext3 filesystem which syncs to disk about every 5 seconds.  Short of
editing source I didn't find this to be user tunable.  Needless to
say this kills your battery as the hard disk never gets to spin down.  I
went back to using ext2.  I also run noflushd and stop all unnecessary 
services that might log to disk often (atd, cron, sendmail) when on 
battery.  Battery lasts longer and disk is much quieter even on AC
power.  The down side is if I ever have a lockup I have to wait for fsck
to run on the next boot.  
-- 
scot

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