# how to reduce (disable) hdd writing (noise) all the time?

## hulk2nd

hi there, 

my notebook hard drive is going on my nerves!!! it is a 60gb hitachi disk and it is clicking nearly every 3 seconds. when i installed gentoo i decided to use reiserfs, cause i thought (one of) the advantage of a journaling filesystem is, that it doesn't write all the time like it does for example on ntfs (correct me when i'm wrong). and i'm really going mad if the notebook is next to me and is idleing but it always reads or writes something (or whatever) on the hdd and this sound comes every 3 or 5 seconds. i tried nearly every hdparm setting but i had no success until now  :Crying or Very sad: 

thanks and greets,

hulk

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## jonash

Im using noatime option in /etc/fstab

 *Quote:*   

> 
> 
> # noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't
> 
> 

 

```

jonash@centrino jonash $ cat /etc/fstab

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.

# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/fstab,v 1.13 2003/07/17 19:55:18 azarah Exp $

#

# noatime turns off atimes for increased performance (atimes normally aren't

# needed; notail increases performance of ReiserFS (at the expense of storage

# efficiency).  It's safe to drop the noatime options if you want and to

# switch between notail and tail freely.

 

# <fs>                  <mountpoint>    <type>          <opts>                  <dump/pass>

 

# NOTE: If your BOOT partition is ReiserFS, add the notail option to opts.

/dev/hda2               /boot           ext3            noauto,noatime          1 1

/dev/hda5               /               reiserfs        noatime                 0 0

/dev/hda3               none            swap            sw                      0 0

/dev/hda6               /home/          reiserfs        noatime                 0 0

/dev/hda7               /mnt/hda7       vfat            noauto,user,noatime,umask=0000  0 0

/dev/hda1               /mnt/hda1       vfat            noauto,user,noatime,umask=0000 0 0

/dev/cdroms/cdrom0      /mnt/cdrom      iso9660         user,noauto,ro          0 0

 

# NOTE: The next line is critical for boot!

none                    /proc           proc            defaults                0 0

 

# glibc 2.2 and above expects tmpfs to be mounted at /dev/shm for

# POSIX shared memory (shm_open, shm_unlink).

# (tmpfs is a dynamically expandable/shrinkable ramdisk, and will

#  use almost no memory if not populated with files)

# Adding the following line to /etc/fstab should take care of this:

 

none                    /dev/shm        tmpfs           defaults                0 0

```

and cpudyn  to control  power consumption via cpufreq and disk standby

You only need add or edit your /etc/init.d/cpudyn file with this lines:

```

TIMEOUT=60

DISKS=/dev/hda
```

Chose your device and you timeout

http://mnm.uib.es/~gallir/cpudyn/

After, add the cpudyn initscript to the boot runlevel

```

# rc-update add cpudyn boot 
```

It works

Srry my english isnt perfect  :Very Happy: 

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## amne

i'm using noflushd (in portage) with reiserfs. the docs say, that it doesn't perform too well with journalling filesystems, from my experience it works quite well.

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## h.u.n.t.e.r

I have a thinkpad R40 and I believe I also have a hitachi hd.

I'm experiencing the same problem: whenever my laptop is idle; the h d 'clicks' ; sometimes a 'hard click'.

It doesn't happens in windows xp.

I'm using ext3.

hulk2nd, did you allready found a solution?

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## kgraehl

I think I solved my laptop hard-drive always-spinning-up issue. A couple of tips:

Make sure your metalog is using buffering, because if not you will be writing to your drive every time something gets logged? (/etc/conf.d/metalog tells us to add the -a tag)

I'm not sure about this, but perhaps our cron daemon is being hit up to search some file somewhere and that spins up our disk. I turned my vixie-cron off and now my drive stays asleep.

Thirdly, things like browsing the web want to store cache on the disk? If only we could keep everything buffered!

I'm trying to get a program called noflushd that supposedly does just that, keep everything buffered. Note: the ebuild (ver 2.6.3) doesn't work with 2.6 kernels, you'll need to get it through cvs at sourceforge and get the noflushd 2.7. Hmm, perhaps I'll learn how to make an ebuild...

Does my vixie-cron really need to access the drive every so-and-so seconds or can it buffer its lovely jobs? Is there a better cron daemon in this regard?

Can somebody give me a few tips on how I can look around in my /proc or someplace for information on what's accessing my harddrive?

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## TopherC

I don't have any advice that hasn't been suggested above, but just wanted co comiserate some.  My Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop also begins clicking every few minutes (it's not so bad), and I'm thinking that this is an uncommon hard drive problem.  The drive has been working fine for the last nearly 2 years, so I don't feel the need to replace it.  But that sound is annoying.  It's a "tick-a-tick-a-tick-a" sound at about 5 Hz.  FWIW, I don't notice the sound in Linux nearly as much as Win XP.  But to get rid of that completely I think you'll just need a new HD.

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## xmit

I don't think that this is a hardware problem. Use 'procinfo -n1' (emerge procinfo) and you will see, that the ide irq increments with each click noise. A few seconds later the heads return to its parking position which makes another noise.

It must be some of the services started with the 'default' runlevel that, e.g. syslogd, samba, xdm, ntpd, etc. Remove them all (rc-update del samba default), or start into the 'nonetwork' runlevel instead and the irq count does no longer change and the noise is gone when the system is idle.

I think using the 'noflashcd' package is a quite good hint. Because I have reiserfs and kernel 2.6 here, I didn't have the heart to do so yet.

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## jonson

im having the same problem... i just put a new hitachi 40gb drive into my ibook only to have it click all the time!!

i tried that suggestion, 'procinfo -n1' and my ide irc keeps going up, even when i shut down everything  (only kernel stuff running), the only other thing counting up too is the VIA-PMU irq....    everything else is idle....

oh ya i unloaded all the modules before i did that too...

any ideas?

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## h.u.n.t.e.r

what happens when you boot without kde?

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## jonson

same deal... i shut down all my services in /etc/init.d then kill everything else that's not essential and run procinfo from a console....

VIA-PMU is the power management stuff for my ibook, so i disabling that in the kernel isn't an option  (can't be the prob b/c my old hd used to spin down fine)

i dont really know what else to do, anyone have any ideas?

thx

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## drakos7

This has been discussed elsewhere also. I have a sony GRX550. The clicking is really annoying anytime I am not in the server room (when all the fans drown out all noise).

All indications point to the HD heads parking. It is not as noisy when I am in Win2k so something is being done differently.

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## xmit

I have a ibm/hitachi IC25N040ATCS05-0, 40GB. I solved this problem with noflushd. Please read the 'elsewhere' thread:https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=125222&highlight=

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