Matt Price wrote: > I'm trying to set my (aging) laptop up for maximum power > efficiency. using hdparm, I set the spindown time very short, I don't > use x, and I've gone so far as to shutdown things like cron and atd. > Pretty much the only thing I have running is emacs (see the output of > ps, attached). But somehow the hard drive keeps spinning back up > spontaneously. Who's accessing my hard drive?? I don't have the > slightest idea how to find out, or (even better) figure out how to > stop it from happening. > > Can anyone help me with this?
I don't know the details but I was under the impression that the "laptop-mode" patch to the linux kernel included the ability to have the process waking up the disk logged. That might come in handy if it's true. Anyone know more about this? Other than that my first guess would be a journaling filesystem. There's also a shell script included with the patch mentioned above that sets the time between updates of the journal to 10 minutes. See for example here: http://lwn.net/Articles/32520/ Cheers, Mika
