Re: Advice on Power Management

On Mon, Aug 31, 1998 at 08:56:14AM -0600, Schneider, Tim wrote:
> So I got this Pentium now, with power management features in the BIOS. I
> haven't rebuilt the kernel from my 486 yet. I have noticed that when I
> leave the PC on for a while (overnight) and it's running Win95 the drives
> power down. When I run Slakware 2.??? I notice that the system writes to
> the hard drives periodically. I believe that this background update is
> keeping the drives from powering down. I'm not sure if this is a good thing
> or a bad thing or just because I need to compile in some support for APM in
> the kernel.
> I open the floor to your thoughts please.
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ok, for one thing, i dont recommend settings drives to power down and power up
ALOT, like, its maybe ok a couple times a day, but i'm sure that if its set to
spin down after only a few minutes of inactivity your sure to kill the disk
fast. my machines almost never power down, (i even leave my ###95 box up running
24hours, tho it may crash in my sleep, the
disks still spin <g> ).

In the past oh, 4 or so years i've only had 1 disk die on me (bought used,
was very old to begin with) so running 24hrs cant be that hard on them.

i've seen many a article about admin having trouble like hell with disks dieing
left right and centre in computer labs, only to later implement a "never turn
the bugger off" policy, and suddenly WAY less drive failures.

probably the only reason to go with spindown, is if u have to sleep in the same
room your computer(s) live(s).

now, if u do want to venture out there, one of the things you'll want is to
recompile your kernel with the "no-atime" option in ext2fs (so when anything
that just "reads" off the filesystem wont require a spinup just to change
the "last accessed" time of the file. (if its already in the cache)

this i came accross.
/system/hardware/ update-spindown patch.

i actually did play with this stuff once (i think it actually was around
the time that disk died..sp00kie) anyways, i came accross a kit for this
kinda thing, and one of the things it mentioned, was having the entire /dev
tree copied over to a little 100k or so ramdisk while u boot up, and then
mounted overtop the old /dev tree. cant remember exactly why, its been years tho.

bdflush, crond and "at" are the usualls to keep a disk from spinning down, that
and sendmail and quake2 <g>

-- 
--
Mark Duguid     Saskatoon, Saskatchewan      highbit@spooge.dyn.ml.org
 When u buy a computer, u buy a "hole", only this hole is infinitely
 deep, where no upgrade can satisfy the hunger, only passifying it
 till the next big game release.
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