Arch Linux

Algol

Member

Registered: 2005-01-05

Posts: 37

Harddrive noise

I have a fairly quiet computer and I thought I had choosen a quiet harddrive as well, but as it turns out, the seagate barracuda makes a little buzzing noise sometimes when it reads or writes.

Now, for some reason I have some small disk activity (reads) about every 3 seconds, I can see it in gkrellm as a small spike of 319k. This is the last audible noise coming from my computer (at least when I'm not using it), and I would very much like to see it go away.

This is on a freshly booted system, that hasn't even filled half of available ram, so it isn't swapping (hopefully), and is running nothing except KDE (or gnome, same problem there)

Is there any tool to see what is writing and how much? I read some time back that the laptop-patch for the kernel, among other things, would limit the amount of reads and/or writes to save power... could that feature possibly be used here? I've tried to put the HD to sleep or standby with hdparm, but it just spits out errors... which might have to do with the fact that it's a SATA drive?

Help appreciated.

kth5

Member

Registered: 2004-04-29

Posts: 657

Website

Re: Harddrive noise

the kernel likes to access the filesystem on a regular basis. try to use

noatime

option in fstab for filesystems to be mounted.

---

I recognize that while theory and practice are, in theory, the same, they are, in practice, different. -Mark Mitchell

Algol

Member

Registered: 2005-01-05

Posts: 37

Re: Harddrive noise

Easy as that. Thanks a bunch! :-)