drive always being written to, wont spin down
 

ive turned off all syslog activity (i think) only thing i know of for sure thats still llogging is acpid. gets a batt signal every single minute i think its something to do with ac power being plugged in. i dont know how to stop acpi from logging. any help?

A couple of things can cause activity like this. One would be insufficient RAM, which leads to disk thrashing. Another would be the "updatedb" program which keeps an index or database of information on locations of all files for the "locate" command. I have found the latter to be fairly common on my system.

i only thing i can find that is writing to the drive is acpid log, i just dont know how to stop its log. the man page doesnt say.

ok ive stopped acpid logging by sending its output to /dev/null. ive stopped each of the running processes and all syslog, kernel log, and i still have this problem. its like every 20 seconds or so theres just a little tick on the hard drive when im watching gkrellm. how can i find out what is going on there? i really need to stop this ghastly activity so my hard drive can turn off once in awhile.

im not positive but it seems that it may have some relation to similar activity on eth0: tick on eth0, tick on hda............tick on eth0,tick on hda.......... like that. but i turned off all the network services and it was still doing it on the hard drive

runnning mdk9.1

is there a way to like copy what goes to the hard drive or something and write to a file so i can try to find out what is being written all the time?

anybody know what could be writing to my drive? before i give up and change distros?
maybe one of the great ones could move this thread to laptops cause it feels more cozy there.

I've experienced this happening to drives shortly before they die.. Its actually happening to one of my drives (IBM, SCSI, DDYS-) right now! And it had previously happened to this same drive shortly before I had RMAed it for the second time due to failing. Unfortunately, I can't RMA the drive until it gives a fail code with their test utilities.

Grab a utility like IBM's DFT (http://www.hgst.com/hdd/support/download.htm), run the test, and along the way, take notice of any 'unsolicited hard drive activity'.

It has to be said... are you sure you want your HDDs to spin down? It is my understanding that when they spin, they basically float on acushion of air, with no metal touching metal, and the wear is basically nil when spinning. I was lead to believe the stress and wear to a HD is spinning up and spinning down.

Sorry for going off-topic a bit, and I'm sure you have a good reason for wanting to spin down, but I'm just keying this in because of my belief that it's better to have a disc always spinning than continually stopping and re-starting.

halz: i hope your wrong but thanks for your answer ill give it a try after i figure out how to make it a bootable cd cause i dont have a floppy drive.

jlangelier: i didnt really consider that before. my concern has been battery life so ill have to find how much of a difference it would make.