[wplug] Laptop disk access question

[Teodorski, Chris]

Seems to happen on AC or battery... 

Does not appear to be load related -- I was running KDE on FreeBSD so I would expect it was pretty intense too.

 

-----Original Message-----
From: wplug-bounces+teodorski=ppg.com at wplug.org [mailto:wplug-bounces+teodorski=ppg.com at wplug.org] On Behalf Of Eric Cooper
Sent: Wednesday, August 24, 2005 2:46 PM
To: wplug at wplug.org
Subject: Re: [wplug] Laptop disk access question

On Wed, Aug 24, 2005 at 02:32:18PM -0400, Teodorski, Chris wrote:
> I have Ubuntu installed on my Dell laptop and the drive sounds like
> it is spinning VERY frequently.  When I hear the drive spinning,
> "stuff" I'm doing in X seems to hang -- but only for a split second
> and then things are normal -- until the next noise from the drive.
> 
> However when I installed FreeBSD on the laptop I did not have the
> same issue -- which suggests that FreeBSD interacted with the drive
> differently in some way.
> 
> Does anyone have any idea what I need to do to stop this from
> happening in Linux?  I'm wondering if this is DMA related and if so,
> how do I fix it?

Ubuntu may have configured laptop-mode by default, which spins down
your hard drive when not in use (perhaps too aggressively).  The noise
and delay might be when it has to spin back up.  If the problem goes
away when your laptop is on AC power, this is probably the reason.
You might also try the laptop-mode-utils package, which lets you tweak
the settings.

-- 
Eric Cooper             e c c @ c m u . e d u
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