HD Noise

[Jonathan Rawle]

Wade Chandler wrote:

>> I have a Dell Inspirion Laptop.  The hard drive is very quite all day;
>> however, when I leave it idle at night, it starts spinning like crazy. 
>> I would turn it off; however, I use KAlarm as my alarm clock so it sits
>> by my bed on my desk all night.  I was wondering what would cause it to
>> suddenly make so much noise and how I could fix it.
>> 
>> 
> It is probably running updatedb.  This is what locate uses.  This gives
> you very fast file searches using the locate command.  If you haven't
> ever heard of locate or used it then you can probably disable this
> without a care.
> 

If you don't leave your machine on at night, it does this each day after
it's been on for an hour.

It isn't only "updatedb" that is running at night, but also other useful
things such as "prelink" and various log rotation scripts. I suggest
changing /etc/crontab so that these jobs are run during the day. Simply
change the three number "4"s to "12" to run them at midday, or "9" to run
them in the morning, etc. Then they won't wake you up at 4am!

Jonathan