From owner-freebsd-mobile Tue Nov 17 01:19:47 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id BAA13486 for freebsd-mobile-outgoing; Tue, 17 Nov 1998 01:19:47 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from caladan.tdx.co.uk (caladan.tdx.co.uk [195.188.177.4]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id BAA13481 for ; Tue, 17 Nov 1998 01:19:44 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from kpielorz@tdx.co.uk) Received: from tdx.co.uk (lorca-tx.tdx.co.uk [195.188.177.242]) by caladan.tdx.co.uk (8.9.1a/8.9.1) with ESMTP id JAA07326; Tue, 17 Nov 1998 09:19:15 GMT Message-ID: <36513F92.DD7C7908@tdx.co.uk> Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 09:19:14 +0000 From: Karl Pielorz Organization: TDX - The Digital eXchange X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: "G. Rafe" CC: freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Q: Why Constant/Regular Disk Activity? References: <199811170642.BAA07450@lab12.ie.pitt.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org "G. Rafe" wrote: > My question has to do with a very regular and constant disk activity > I'm seeing on the newer 330CDS, which prevents the disk from spinning down > after some period of inactivity. > The older 220CDS behaves normally [i.e., the disk spins down after a bit]; > the disk on this 330CDS, however, gets hit by some process every 30 seconds > [exactly]. There is a FreeBSD system process that sync's the disk every 30 seconds... I've always found due to the level of logging + other activity on FreeBSD that spinning drives down on laptops is currently a bad idea... Also on the two machines I've tried it on - only one of them would survive the impending interrupt timeouts etc. that get generated when FreeBSD wants the disk again in a hurry... And even then it wasn't a 100% sure bet the machine would survive... FreeBSD likes to swap things out to disk as well - this doesn't help either... In short I don't think you'll be able to do a lot with it... On my current laptop I disable the drive spinning down and it works fine. From general usage I would say it probably wastes about 10-20% of the battery, which for me isn't too high a price to pay... Regards, Karl To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-mobile" in the body of the message