I wonder if it would make any sense, or save power maybe to use a PCMCIA flash card for logs and stuff. They are pretty cheap these days and the industrial grade ones have 1million write cycles. This way the hd can spin down even when those things keep going. Benjamin E. Neigebauer Software Engineer Compellent Technologies Eden Prairie, MN 55344 -----Original Message----- From: tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org [mailto:tclug-list-bounces at mn-linux.org] On Behalf Of Scot Jenkins Sent: Tuesday, May 18, 2004 11:07 AM To: TCLUG Mailing List Subject: Re: [TCLUG] Fedroa+laptop=Constant Hard drive activity 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 _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list _______________________________________________ TCLUG Mailing List - Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota Help beta test TCLUG's potential new home: http://plone.mn-linux.org Got pictures for TCLUG? Beta test http://plone.mn-linux.org/gallery tclug-list at mn-linux.org https://mailman.real-time.com/mailman/listinfo/tclug-list