On Tue, 18 May 2004 11:06:46 -0500, Scot Jenkins <scot at thinkunix.net>  
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.


Doh!  I bet that's it.

Thanks - I'll try out ext2 next time I have to setup on a laptop.


> 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.



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