On Sat, Sep 08, 2012 at 09:56:08PM +0200, Pontus wrote:
On 09/06/2012 06:06 AM, Tothwolf wrote:
One of the key things I've discovered with higher quality drives
is that the lower the number of head retractions (and spin down
cycles) the longer the drive seems to last. I initially discovered
this purely by accident, and this is something you /never/ want to
see:
Which is why you can buy drives that doesn't spin down.
Ultimately Linux itself wasn't the cause, the
hard drive itself
just defaulted to a very very dumb power management mode. The
default power management mode might not have been as bad with a
fat32 or vfat filesystem, but filesystems such as ext2/ext3
constantly want to update atime, so with my drive it turned out
the heads would retract/reload roughly 1.71 times per minute.
Doesn't most people mount ext2/ext3 with "noatime" ?
Depends, noatime is usually used when one wants to keep writes down
as far as possible, e.g. when running from CF/SD cards. When running
normal machines with harddisks or SSDs, noatime isn't used, especially
since it breaks some assumptions about filesystem semantics.
Kind regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison