I have a Centos installed on a Hitachi 2.5" drive that shuts off really quickly, it seems. So every 30 sec, the drive makes the sound of an access activity. I have looked trying to find what might be being updated. Swap drive usage is 0 bytes. No activity in /var/log. What might it be and can I do anything to lessen the drive access (improve battery life)?
Robert Moskowitz wrote:> I have a Centos installed on a Hitachi 2.5" drive that shuts off really > quickly, it seems. > > So every 30 sec, the drive makes the sound of an access activity. I > have looked trying to find what might be being updated. Swap drive > usage is 0 bytes. No activity in /var/log. What might it be and can I > do anything to lessen the drive access (improve battery life)?I'm sure there are other things as well but first thing comes to mind is disabling atime for your file systems, to test the change you can do this (for each of the mount points) mount <mount point> -o remount,noatime e.g. mount / -o remount,noatime mount /usr -o remount,noatime You can verify the options by running 'mount'. If this does the trick you can add the options to /etc/fstab, e.g. LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults,noatime 1 1 nate
Thanks, but explain... nate wrote:> Robert Moskowitz wrote: > >> I have a Centos installed on a Hitachi 2.5" drive that shuts off really >> quickly, it seems. >> >> So every 30 sec, the drive makes the sound of an access activity. I >> have looked trying to find what might be being updated. Swap drive >> usage is 0 bytes. No activity in /var/log. What might it be and can I >> do anything to lessen the drive access (improve battery life)? >> > > I'm sure there are other things as well but first thing comes to mind is > disabling atime for your file systems, to test the change you can do this > > (for each of the mount points) > mount <mount point> -o remount,noatime >Everything is quite on the notebook front. Now. But What is going on here? atime -- Update inode access time for each access. This is the default. noatime -- Do not update inode access times on this file system (e.g, for faster access on the news spool to speed up news servers). Are the inodes being updated or some info about inode access times? If you have a partition for a mail share, would this help it too (like it does for a news server)?> e.g. > > mount / -o remount,noatime > mount /usr -o remount,noatime > > You can verify the options by running 'mount'. If this does the trick > you can add the options to /etc/fstab, e.g. > > LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults,noatime > 1 1 > > nate > > > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > >
nate wrote:> Robert Moskowitz wrote: > >> I have a Centos installed on a Hitachi 2.5" drive that shuts off really >> quickly, it seems. >> >> So every 30 sec, the drive makes the sound of an access activity. I >> have looked trying to find what might be being updated. Swap drive >> usage is 0 bytes. No activity in /var/log. What might it be and can I >> do anything to lessen the drive access (improve battery life)? >> > > I'm sure there are other things as well but first thing comes to mind is > disabling atime for your file systems, to test the change you can do this > > (for each of the mount points) > mount <mount point> -o remount,noatimeOh, I only did this for the mounts in the LVM partition: / and /home I forgot to do /boot which is a plain old ext3 Still things are quite. This itself is interesting if only ext3 mounts in LVM partitions not just plain ext3 partitions suffer from this. OOPS, been 15 min, about, and I just heard the drive seek again. But 15 min I can live with; 30 sec was nerve-racking (on an otherwise silent system, no fan).
On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 18:35 -0400, Robert Moskowitz wrote:> I have a Centos installed on a Hitachi 2.5" drive that shuts off really > quickly, it seems. > > So every 30 sec, the drive makes the sound of an access activity. I > have looked trying to find what might be being updated. Swap drive > usage is 0 bytes. No activity in /var/log. What might it be and can I > do anything to lessen the drive access (improve battery life)?---- don't use a journalled filesystem (ext3) Craig
Craig White wrote:> On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 18:35 -0400, Robert Moskowitz wrote: > >> I have a Centos installed on a Hitachi 2.5" drive that shuts off really >> quickly, it seems. >> >> So every 30 sec, the drive makes the sound of an access activity. I >> have looked trying to find what might be being updated. Swap drive >> usage is 0 bytes. No activity in /var/log. What might it be and can I >> do anything to lessen the drive access (improve battery life)? >> > ---- > don't use a journalled filesystem (ext3)there is a bit to be said about that for a notebook. Particularly if you separate /home to its own partition. I mean why is /boot a ext3 partition in Centos install? Why not ext2. Perhaps / could be too. but would you want to put /var/log on a journalling partition? I guess there have been flames all over the place on these default decisions.