On Sun, Jul 30, 2000 at 11:29:19PM -0400, Robert M. Love wrote:
> Michael Bacarella wrote:
> > Why is this even desirable?
> >
> > Wouldn't you want the drives to just spin forever? I always understood
> > that spinning something down and then spinning it back up is what causes
> > them to degrade/die. The analogy would be that a car that runs it's engine
> > for 10 years straight never needs major repairs, whereas one that is
> > turned on, driven, turned off, repeat, will be slowly destroyed.
If you don't like it, then don't let it happen :) There are several utilities out there that prevent this (noflushd is one of them). I wrote one too. It just disables the flushing of dirty buffers. When it notices that the disks are back up (something read or wrote to the disk) it'll flush the buffers. If this does not happen in a specified time, it'll flush and so it will wake the disk (I use a timeout of 12 hours, so the maximum time my disk is spun down is 12 hours).
You can always get the source from me if you like ...
If using this utility, it's not necessairy to use the noatime or nodiratime option for mount ...
>
> It is, and you are right. But that is not the goal. He wants to spin them
> down and then *keep them spun down.* Thus, an hour a day of driving is
> better than driving all day or start/drive/stop all day.
>
> This was his original problem, sync was causing his drives to spin back up,
> when he wanted them to stay down.
>
> > At least, this is what my high school science teacher taught us, which I
> > probably took for granted. Are hard drives an exception, or was I just
> > misguided? :)
Indeed, disks don't like being spun up and down a lot...
Kind regards
Jan Gyselinck
jan.gyselinck@be.uu.net
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