> > accessed for days, so I wonder if I can extend the life of the disks > > by spinning them down, eg by setting the spindown timeout for the you seem to be assuming that the drives have a lifespan measured in hours-spinning. that's not at all clear. for instance, drives are typically rated 40-50K start-stop cycles, which is ~40/day over a 3-year service life. you clearly do not want to auto-spindown unless you are sure that they'll spun-down for a fairly long time. even ignoring delay in spinup... > that good. Too many things running on your server will keep them going - > eg. ext3 likes to peek at the drives every 5 seconds (and it's probable > that other journaling FS's to some extent or other). I don't believe ext3 will generate journal forces unless you do something that generates data or journal IO. for instance, atime updates are often overlooked here. I generally turn atime stuff off anyway. > Then there's > log-files - you'll need to go through syslog.conf and "-" every file to > suppress the fflush. often a good idea anyway, especially if your server generates lots of logs. or how about logging to some other machine (which has additional advantages...) > And then the kernel just wants to flush its buffers > from time to time because it's in a good mood. for some reason I don't tend to anthropomorphize the kernel ;) but really, I can't think of any random, spontaneous flushes. things like dirty pagecache stuff will get pdflushed on a clear schedule (/proc/sys/vm/*centiseconds). - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-raid" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
