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Date:      Tue, 17 Nov 1998 09:19:14 +0000
From:      Karl Pielorz <kpielorz@tdx.co.uk>
To:        "G. Rafe" <grafe@lab12.ie.pitt.edu>
Cc:        freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: Q: Why Constant/Regular Disk Activity?
Message-ID:  <36513F92.DD7C7908@tdx.co.uk>
References:  <199811170642.BAA07450@lab12.ie.pitt.edu>

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"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

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