Random Hard Drive Spin Ups
 

Hi,

I have a crappy old laptop that is on its last legs, but I use it as a print server (and as a linux server) on my network - so it is fairly useful to me.

I leave this laptop on all the time, but only access it over my network occasionally. As such, I thought it would be nice to use HDPARM to get the hard drive to spin down after about 30 seconds to prolong the life of my hard drive.

This works, but for some reason about every two - three minutes the hard drive mysteriously spins up, whirs for about thirty seconds and then spins down.

I thought this may have been due to the fact that I was almost totally reliant on swap space (only had 64MB), so I upgraded to 200MB - same problem.

Tried monitoring processes to see what is causing this, but to no avail.

Running RH9, Compaq Armada 1750.

Anyone help?

Doc

Thats the beauty of RH 8 and up, even when your not using it RH is. More than likely it has to do with the RH network auto update feature checking in. That is just a guess and as you can tell I am not fond of it. Kind of reminds you of another software that comes out of Redmond don't it:).

I can't be windows free until there is an Autocad for Linux but soon I will be Redhat free!

ha ha... so true. I did find something called alarm, which I dutifully removed, but didn't change a thing.

Any other diagnostic ideas?

Extra info - I run Samba on the Linux box as I share it with that other redmond product you refer to.

Doc

Your laptop doesn't have a pwr save file like my older Dell does it? When my battery gets to low it saves everything to this file B4 it dies. Which means the bios is always interacting with the system keeping track of battery life and the condition of the harddrive.

No it does not, and it is run off mains anyway.