how to reduce (disable) hdd writing (noise) all the time?

hulk2nd

hi there,
my notebook hard drive is going on my nerves!!! it is a 60gb hitachi disk and it is clicking nearly every 3 seconds. when i installed gentoo i decided to use reiserfs, cause i thought (one of) the advantage of a journaling filesystem is, that it doesn't write all the time like it does for example on ntfs (correct me when i'm wrong). and i'm really going mad if the notebook is next to me and is idleing but it always reads or writes something (or whatever) on the hdd and this sound comes every 3 or 5 seconds. i tried nearly every hdparm setting but i had no success until now :cry:

thanks and greets,
hulk

jonash · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 04 Apr 2003 Posts: 107

Im using noatime option in /etc/fstab

amne · Posted: Mon Dec 01, 2003 10:42 am Post subject:

i'm using noflushd (in portage) with reiserfs. the docs say, that it doesn't perform too well with journalling filesystems, from my experience it works quite well.

h.u.n.t.e.r · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2003 Posts: 63 Location: Belgium

I have a thinkpad R40 and I believe I also have a hitachi hd.
I'm experiencing the same problem: whenever my laptop is idle; the h d 'clicks' ; sometimes a 'hard click'.

It doesn't happens in windows xp.

I'm using ext3.

hulk2nd, did you allready found a solution?

kgraehl · n00b Joined: 13 Sep 2003 Posts: 54

I think I solved my laptop hard-drive always-spinning-up issue. A couple of tips:

Make sure your metalog is using buffering, because if not you will be writing to your drive every time something gets logged? (/etc/conf.d/metalog tells us to add the -a tag)

I'm not sure about this, but perhaps our cron daemon is being hit up to search some file somewhere and that spins up our disk. I turned my vixie-cron off and now my drive stays asleep.

Thirdly, things like browsing the web want to store cache on the disk? If only we could keep everything buffered!

I'm trying to get a program called noflushd that supposedly does just that, keep everything buffered. Note: the ebuild (ver 2.6.3) doesn't work with 2.6 kernels, you'll need to get it through cvs at sourceforge and get the noflushd 2.7. Hmm, perhaps I'll learn how to make an ebuild...

Does my vixie-cron really need to access the drive every so-and-so seconds or can it buffer its lovely jobs? Is there a better cron daemon in this regard?

Can somebody give me a few tips on how I can look around in my /proc or someplace for information on what's accessing my harddrive?

TopherC · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2004 3:15 am Post subject:

I don't have any advice that hasn't been suggested above, but just wanted co comiserate some. My Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop also begins clicking every few minutes (it's not so bad), and I'm thinking that this is an uncommon hard drive problem. The drive has been working fine for the last nearly 2 years, so I don't feel the need to replace it. But that sound is annoying. It's a "tick-a-tick-a-tick-a" sound at about 5 Hz. FWIW, I don't notice the sound in Linux nearly as much as Win XP. But to get rid of that completely I think you'll just need a new HD.

xmit · Posted: Mon Jan 26, 2004 7:23 pm Post subject:

I don't think that this is a hardware problem. Use 'procinfo -n1' (emerge procinfo) and you will see, that the ide irq increments with each click noise. A few seconds later the heads return to its parking position which makes another noise.

It must be some of the services started with the 'default' runlevel that, e.g. syslogd, samba, xdm, ntpd, etc. Remove them all (rc-update del samba default), or start into the 'nonetwork' runlevel instead and the irq count does no longer change and the noise is gone when the system is idle.

I think using the 'noflashcd' package is a quite good hint. Because I have reiserfs and kernel 2.6 here, I didn't have the heart to do so yet.

jonson · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 14 Location: vancouver

im having the same problem... i just put a new hitachi 40gb drive into my ibook only to have it click all the time!!

i tried that suggestion, 'procinfo -n1' and my ide irc keeps going up, even when i shut down everything (only kernel stuff running), the only other thing counting up too is the VIA-PMU irq.... everything else is idle....

oh ya i unloaded all the modules before i did that too...

any ideas?

h.u.n.t.e.r · n00b Joined: 04 Jun 2003 Posts: 63 Location: Belgium

what happens when you boot without kde?

jonson · n00b Joined: 29 Dec 2003 Posts: 14 Location: vancouver

same deal... i shut down all my services in /etc/init.d then kill everything else that's not essential and run procinfo from a console....

VIA-PMU is the power management stuff for my ibook, so i disabling that in the kernel isn't an option (can't be the prob b/c my old hd used to spin down fine)

i dont really know what else to do, anyone have any ideas?
thx

drakos7 · Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2004 5:42 pm Post subject:

This has been discussed elsewhere also. I have a sony GRX550. The clicking is really annoying anytime I am not in the server room (when all the fans drown out all noise).
All indications point to the HD heads parking. It is not as noisy when I am in Win2k so something is being done differently.
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xmit · Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2004 7:43 pm Post subject:

I have a ibm/hitachi IC25N040ATCS05-0, 40GB. I solved this problem with noflushd. Please read the 'elsewhere' thread:https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=125222&highlight=