Arch Linux

Spacenick

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2010-04-02

Posts: 168

How to minimize disk access to the absolute minimum?

Ok here is what I'm trying to get:
- I want my home server to access it's disks only when really necassary and power them down all the other time
Here is where I stand:
- Using hdparm it powers it's drives down when not accessed, this works for the second btrfs drive very well and worked perfectly while running the system from usb (this didn't work out because
after some time the usb stick would fail on me with read errors and the server would have to be restarted manually)
- However it does not work for the disk hosting the root filesystem, deactivating syslog-ng gets me as far as iotop not showing any activity, unless 2 kernel tasks belongig to the journaling of ext4 to run,
but thats still enough to make the system spin up it's disk and, can't cache this. I tried mounting relatime and without journaling but then [sync-super] and [flush-8-0] access the disk.

Anyone know of a way to make the system really spin down all it's hard drives until there is something useful to do with them like a cron job or me accessing my data?
Note the server is running headless, without much only apache (serving static content or my own cgis no databases) and sshd
Thanks in advance

mcover

Member

From: Germany

Registered: 2007-01-25

Posts: 134

Re: How to minimize disk access to the absolute minimum?

I successfully used laptop-mode-tools with a desktop/server before. Simply set the cache-time really high. Otherwise I wouldn't know of a solution.