hard drive power down in FC1

[Tom Mitchell]

On Tue, 23 Dec 2003, M.Hockings wrote:

> In the BIOS I have the hard drives set to spin down after 10 minutes of 
> inactivity.  This seems to work just fine if I run under Windows (sorry 
> for the bad words :-).  However in FC1 they never seem to spin down.  
> Where might I find a comparable setting to cause the drives to power off 
> when they have been idle for some period of time?

My guess is that your disks are are not idle long enough.

In a text window if you look with "lsof" you can see a list of
open files in the system. A Linux system can have a lot going on
in the background.  If you run the command "sar -d 5 5" you will
see measures of disk activity.

I suspect the output of sar will show low but non zero disk IO.

>From the sar man page:
  # man sar
    ...snip...

       -d     Report activity for each block device  (kernels  2.4  and  later
              only).  When data is displayed, the device specification dev m-n
              is generally used ( DEV column).  m is the major number  of  the
              device, whereas n is a distinctive number.

              tps
                     Indicate  the  number  of  transfers per second that were
                     issued to the device.  Multiple logical requests  can  be
                     combined  into  a  single  I/O  request  to the device. A
                     transfer is of indeterminate size.

              sect/s
                     Number of sectors transferred from or to the device.  The
                     size of a sector is 512 bytes.
    ...snip...


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	T o m  M i t c h e l l
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