Hi, I am running centos on a laptop and the HD keeps on making noises every so often, even when I go to runlevel 1 and stop everything that could be doing so (hotplug, smartd, cron, anacron, atd, syslogd...). Is there any way of finding out what is accessing the disk? Not only it shortens battery life, it is annoying while working in a quiet room. Thanks Gabriel Send instant messages to your online friends http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com
On 4/13/05 8:01 AM, first last wrote:> I am running centos on a laptop and the HD keeps on making noises every > so often, even when I go to runlevel 1 and stop everything that could > be doing so (hotplug, smartd, cron, anacron, atd, syslogd...). > > Is there any way of finding out what is accessing the disk? Not only it > shortens battery life, it is annoying while working in a quiet room.My hunch is that it's kjournald. Do you have ext3 filesystems on that machine? You can test it: echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump # wait for disk access to occur dmesg Once you're done, poke 0 into the block_dump setting to stop your kernel log from overflowing. :-) -- Paul Heinlein <> heinlein at madboa.com <> www.madboa.com
first last wrote:>Hi, > >I am running centos on a laptop and the HD keeps on making noises every >so often, even when I go to runlevel 1 and stop everything that could >be doing so (hotplug, smartd, cron, anacron, atd, syslogd...). > >Is there any way of finding out what is accessing the disk? Not only it >shortens battery life, it is annoying while working in a quiet room. > > > >Are you running a journalling file system? It's probably just the disk syncing the journal periodically. Cheers, C
>Is there any way of finding out what is accessing the disk? Not only it >shortens battery life, it is annoying while working in a quiet room.When I had problems with irritating disk noises on a laptop it turned out that the problem wasn't so much disk access as an over-aggressive power management setting. hdparm -I /dev/hda | grep 'power management' should tell you the current setting. The default value seems to be 128, but what exactly that means depends on your hard disk. I found that changing the setting to 200 was a big improvement: hdparm -B 200 /dev/hda You can make the change permanent by editing /etc/sysconfig/harddisks. Ron