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Marko-Serbia

Member

From: Serbia

Registered: 2009-09-06

Posts: 7

Hard disk always working - sync_supers writting to disk every 5 second

As the topic says. My computer is on my desk while I work and I can't stand the noise of hard disk doing something every 5 seconds. I think I noticed this since 2.6.36 kernel.

When computer is completely idle it still writes to disk.

Tried Ubuntu 10.10 and got the same result. I have WD Caviar Blue 500gb. On ext4 filesystem there is jbd2/sda* doing write every 5 seconds or so and on reiserfs there is sync_supers doing the same. I guess those that is journaling acitivy, but its anoying to hear hard drive working when computer is completely idle.

Any tips?

linux

Member

Registered: 2012-04-15

Posts: 1

Re: Hard disk always working - sync_supers writting to disk every 5 second

Does anyone know the destination where sync_supers is writing to?

Today sync_supers has already written about 30MB on my machine

Nanthiel

Member

From: Slovenia

Registered: 2009-09-20

Posts: 148

Re: Hard disk always working - sync_supers writting to disk every 5 second

Try to add a commit=600 (10 minutes) mount option in /etc/fstab to your ext4 partitions. Worked for me.

(Edit)
You may also try noatime.

This is in my /etc/fstab file:

tmpfs           /tmp    tmpfs   nodev,nosuid                    0       0
/dev/sda2       /       ext4    defaults,noatime,commit=600     0       1
/dev/sda3       swap    swap    defaults                        0       0
/dev/sda4       /home   ext4    defaults,noatime,commit=600     0       2

Last edited by Nanthiel (2012-04-15 16:01:14)

thisoldman

Member

From: Pittsburgh

Registered: 2009-04-25

Posts: 1,172

Re: Hard disk always working - sync_supers writting to disk every 5 second

Does anyone know the destination where sync_supers is writing to?

The Linux kernel mailing list has some information that may help on identifying what sync_supers is doing, http://lkml.org/lkml/2012/4/11/147.

While you wait for kernel patches, there are some mount options that other people have suggested may help:

• Use noatime or at least relatime for ext* filesystems

• Use the option commit=60 or commit=300 to lengthen the time between syncs of data and metadata from 5 seconds to 1 or 5 minutes.  However, if the computer crashes between commits there may be some data loss.

• Use hdparm to change the acoustic management settings – https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 5#p1063185