Scot Jenkins wrote:
> 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.  

Since you are already on Fedora core, you might want to go all the way
up to a 2.6 kernel and use laptop mode.

http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsamwel/laptop_mode/

I see there is a note on the above page about laptop mode in 2.4 kernels
as well.


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