2c Tip: Spinning down harddrives (WAS: Re: [TAG] 2 cent tip)

[John Karns]

On Sun, 2 May 2004, Thomas Adam so eloquently said:

> It's also worth noting that if one is using ext3, then the option of
> 'noatime' in /etc/fstab for all ext3 partitions should be used, since
> this will considerably reduce the amount of disk activity (the access
> time for files is not recorded then).
> 
> I have known instances where this command to spin the drive down fails,
> either because the journal is being read to every 5 seconds (this is
> default, see: man tune2fs to change it), or because noflushd is running.

That's where the case of a system volume differs from that of an archive
volume.  The system drive usually hosts a swap partition, which is at
least one reason why the system wants to write to it every few seconds.  
Last I checked, reiserfs still didn't have support for spinning down a
system drive, but it seems to tolerate spinning down a mounted archive
volume w/o problems.  My tip was in reference to archive volumes, which
would natually apply more to desktop systems than to laptops.

--  
John Karns