Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 11:40:20 -0500 From: "Constantine A. Murenin" <mureninc@gmail.com> To: freebsd-hardware@freebsd.org Subject: Limit Continuous Drive Activity to Power Down HDD Message-ID: <f34ca13c0502260840626a829b@mail.gmail.com>
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Hello, I run FreeBSD 4.8 at home. I'd like to be able to run the box continuously, but the HDD is too noisy to leave the system running for all of the time and specifically for the night. The BIOS of the motherboard supports automatic HDD shutdown in XX-minutes of inactivity. However, I have noticed that this doesn't work as intended with FreeBSD: if I set BIOS to shutdown HDD in two minutes of inactivity, and then I start FreeBSD without logging into the system, the disc stops after a few minutes, but it starts again after less than a few minutes due to some disc activity by FreeBSD. Out of services, I run apache, dhcpd, mysqld, sendmail, sshd etc. It's just a home server, so no-one is accessing it all the time. Is there a way to tweak the system to make it keep all of the modifications to the filesystem in memory, and not dump them until some specific time (let's say 09:00) each day, or until the memory is kind of exhausted? (Clearly, this has a disadvantage of the files being lost in case the power goes out, so I'll most likely need to have a UPS.) If something like that is possible, then how do I do that? I can recompile the kernel with no problems. P.S. I have a Pentium 4 1.8GHz Northwood on AOpen AX4G-N (i845g+ICH4) with 256MB DDR266. The HDD is IBM 60GXP IC35L040AVER07-0. There is plenty of free memory (193MB are usually free upon my first login into the system after a reboot), and the swap get's rarely used even when running X with mozilla for a little while. I could probably add more memory if that'll help (additional 256MB or 512MB, totalling to 512MB or 768MB). Thanks, Constantine.
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