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dauerbaustelle

Member

Registered: 2010-02-07

Posts: 62

Figure out what makes my hdd wake up all the time

Hi there,

I bought a MSI Wind U160 and everything works fine so far. However I can't really suspend my HDD because it's waking up again and again all the time.

About a second after I suspended the disk with

# hdparm -Y /dev/sda

the disk wakes up again.

How can I figure out which process/whatever makes the HDD wake up all the time? I thought of powertop at first but it seems that tool can only show CPU wakeups.

Last edited by dauerbaustelle (2010-04-29 22:29:47)

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Figure out what makes my hdd wake up all the time

iotop?

eldragon

Member

From: Buenos Aires

Registered: 2008-11-18

Posts: 1,029

Re: Figure out what makes my hdd wake up all the time

firefox, pidgin

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Figure out what makes my hdd wake up all the time

> firefox, pidgin
/me spits coffee
Errr, I assumed OP has no apps running.

Ogion

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2007-12-11

Posts: 367

Re: Figure out what makes my hdd wake up all the time

Make sure you have "noatime/nodiratime" in your fstab entries.
See here for the reason

Ogion

---

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"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both." - Benjamin Franklin
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eldragon

Member

From: Buenos Aires

Registered: 2008-11-18

Posts: 1,029

Re: Figure out what makes my hdd wake up all the time

> firefox, pidgin
/me spits coffee
Errr, I assumed OP has no apps running.

i just popped the two most annoying apps concerning hdd wakeups... i endeded up sending their profiles to ram during boot in order to avoid just that

dauerbaustelle

Member

Registered: 2010-02-07

Posts: 62

Re: Figure out what makes my hdd wake up all the time

hi guys,

thanks for the fast answers.

Disk *wakeups* appear not be to the problem -- the thing going wrong here are disk *sleeps*. The timeout before my HDD goes in standy (sleep?) is about one second -- that makes working impossible because the disk needs about 3 seconds to wake up.

I tried to adjust the timeout value using `hdparm -S` but my disk seems to ignore the settings. Furthermore `hdparm -C` wakes up the disk to show its status: so the status will always be "active/idle".

I guess there is something wrong with the disk or the disk controller.

Any tips to fix this issues? Thanks!

Last edited by dauerbaustelle (2010-05-02 22:14:10)

eldragon

Member

From: Buenos Aires

Registered: 2008-11-18

Posts: 1,029

Re: Figure out what makes my hdd wake up all the time

using gnome? check the gnome-power-manager

got laptop mode tools? check the wiki how to set that up.

check the bios, it might be doing it.

dauerbaustelle

Member

Registered: 2010-02-07

Posts: 62

Re: Figure out what makes my hdd wake up all the time

hi again,

I'm using laptop mode tools but they didn't change the behaviour in any way. I tried several configurations but no change. I disabled laptop mode tools to set the standby/sleep value by hand as described in my first post, but no change.

Can anyone give me tips how to figure out what hardware doesn't like me here? I don't know much about hard disks, is it the controller or the disk it self or what?