Under Windows 95, it goes down when i tell it to (2 mins of inactive) and stays down until i save whatever I am working on. Under linux, if it goes down at all, it spins back up again immediately. I am guessing that it has something to do with the swap partition?

I understand its not good to have it running constantly, but its not good either to spin it up/down constantly. What is best way to conserve the life of the disk?
I am running SuSE 8, and the disk is 6 years old.

Personally I think the good or bad of a spinning harddrive is debatable. I have two machines here at home that run 24/7, and at least the primary drives are spinning most of the time. No faillures yet.
Some say constant spinning cuts out the stress of a drive having to spin up/down every so often, putting strain on the electronics.
And then some say that keeping the drive silent as much as possible will do that too.
Me, I don't know. I just let them do their thing.

If you find you have increased swapping on your machine, maybe it's time to add some RAM to help it run better.

You can test your theory buy running this command..


swapoff -a

test first to see if you can do without it.

free


total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 513880 381236 132644 0 39388 95168
-/+ buffers/cache: 246680 267200
Swap: 506036 0 506036


and turn it back on with this..

swapon -a