Generally speaking, though, it's better to have your disk never park or spin down than to park and/or spin down, and unpark and/or spin up every 30 seconds. Increasing the power settings to be more 'performance' oriented, in this case, would in most cases where this is occurring drasticly increase the life of one's hard disk (barring an impact to the laptop while the heads aren't parked).
I agree with Mark Thomas that bug #31512 is a contributor, but I can't say it's the definitive culprit. 1: If evolution is running, it accesses the disk about once every minute or two. 2: I don't know if this is common to other filesystems, but I'm running reiserfs. The reiserfs/0 and/or reiserfs/1 kernel processes access the filesystem every 30 seconds (writing). I don't think this is (and I hope it isn't) reiserfs itself doing anything, but rather that it is writing cached output to already-open files. The acpid log gets modified pretty regularly -- enough to be a problem. Any info written to the logs seems to be cached for approximately 30 seconds, then written to disk. At this point, the disk unparks/spins up and then, by hw default, spins down a few seconds later, ostensibly to save hd life by keeping the heads off of the platter in case of a physical jolt. Is there a way, perhaps by remounting /var/log, to give the log dir a stupidly long cache life (or, better yet, simply write whenever it runs out of its allocated memory or if the disk is accessed anyway)? After some misleading research, I discovered that lm-profiler is a nearly (though not entirely) useless tool for this job, since it itself causes writes to the logs every second. <rolls eyes> But the above is what I've found, overall. -- Hard drive spindown should be configurable https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/17216 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is a direct subscriber. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
