Laptop: Hard drive wakes up every 5-10 seconds

Kevin Kofler kevin.kofler at chello.at
Wed Mar 4 01:05:34 UTC 2009


Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> Why would Linux be waking up every 5 to 10 seconds to write to the disk
> when I am sitting at my desktop or sitting at the login screen? (i.e. No
> programs running. Only 40 total wakeups seen in powertop)
> 
> - Seagate 320gig SATA
> - XFS filesystem, relatime mount option enabled
> - link_power_management_policy set to min_power
> - vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs is set to 1500
> 
> I even unmounted /boot (default ext3) but that did not change anything.
> Every 5 to 10 seconds I see the HDD light flash and sometimes I hear a
> very faint "beeping" like the drive is waking up or powering off,
> whichever it is doing.

Try tweaking your hdparm settings.

Adding this to your rc.local might help:
/sbin/hdparm -S 255 /dev/sda
/sbin/hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda

        Kevin Kofler




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