idle HD spin down

[M.Hockings]

-----Original Message-----

>From: fedora-list-admin at redhat.com [mailto:fedora-list-admin at redhat.com] On
>Behalf Of Sy Beamont
>Sent: Wednesday, January 21, 2004 7:14 PM
>To: fedora-list at redhat.com
>Subject: Re: idle HD spin down standby/sleep, laptop mode?? (seagate 7200.7)
>
>On Wednesday 21 January 2004 20:48, Rick Stevens wrote:
>  
>
>>Kevin Bowen wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>I'm trying to get fedora to spin down my primary drive when idle, 
>>>but I can't seem to get it to go into standby mode. When I use 
>>>hdparm to put it into 'sleep' mode, it does sleep very briefly, 
>>>waking up after a few seconds. When I use standby mode (either
>>>      
>>>
>>The system constantly flushes dirty cache buffers to the disk so it 
>>never has a chance to spin down.  A google search for "noflushd"
>>should reveal a daemon that covers this issue that you can install.
>>    
>>
>
>Also setting this up recently I found this message very helpful:
>http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/linux/linux-kernel/2003-21/0022.html
>
>a non-encoded version of the laptop.sh script is at
>http://lwn.net/Articles/32520/
>
>add your hdparm commands to /etc/rc.local and that should do it.
>
>enjoy
>
> Kevin Bowen wrote:
>
>Are noflushd and laptop-mode meant to be used together? I was under the
>impression that noflushd was obsolete (it doesn't seem to be packaged for
>modern distro's anymore). Also, it seems like it is just doing the same
>thing as hdparm -S, isn't it? In any case, I tried it out, and it doesn't
>seem to want to work with my primary drive (the SATA), it says "No stats for
>hde. Ignorning." 
>
>The other stuff (hdparm and laptop-mode.sh) is what I had already done and
>had not worked. 
>
Rick,

You mentioned earlier in this thread that the constant writing to the 
disk was the system flushing dirty cache buffers.  Is this, perchance, 
due to using the ext3 (journaled) file system.  If one changes to ext2 
(non-journaled I believe) would the flushing still occur or is it from 
some other source?

I've tried to get noflushd to work with the current  kernel 
(2.4.22-1.2149.nptl) but apparently it won't work until possibly 
2.4.23.something due to a bug in kupdated.

In my case I'd like to have the FC1 desktop machines spin down their 
drives when they are not used (typically most of the night).

Kind regards,

Mike