"Jane!!! Stop this crazy thing!!!"

[Ed Hill]

On Thu, 2006-05-04 at 09:21 -0700, Mike Duffy wrote:
> Can anyone please explain to me why my hard drive continuously cycles every three to five seconds,
> even when I am not doing anything?  This is incredibly annoying.
> 
> I am using FC-4.  Does anyone know if this bug (please don't tell me it is a feature) has been
> fixed in FC-5?  Does anyone know if there are any other Linux distributions that do not have this
> bug?
> 
> Is there any way to turn this activity off, by killing a process, etc.?  If anyone can help me
> solve this I promise to buy you your favorite beverage if you are ever in Austin. 

Hi Mike,

If you google for ext3 and "5 seconds" you'll see that there are a
number of things going on behind the scenes and one of them is a
5-second commit interval for ext3.  You can set a longer commit interval
but that doesn't solve the root cause which is one or more programs that
keep writing (potentially very small bits of information) to the disk
even when the system is supposedly quiescent.

See the thread at:

https://www.redhat.com/archives/roswell-list/2001-October/msg00060.html
https://www.redhat.com/archives/roswell-list/2001-October/msg00061.html

and try google for more details.

Ed

-- 
Edward H. Hill III, PhD
office:  MIT Dept. of EAPS 54-1424;  77 Massachusetts Ave.
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