Decrease disk activity ?

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=839998

I was a little worried, but it seems this is normal Ubuntu behaviour as shown
in the above thread.
Am interested to know what you think about this. Will it impact on the
longevity of a hard drive ?

 

Interesting, this is one for the Linux Whiz-Kids among us. I'll be watching with interest.

 

I find it quite surprising, I have gkrellm monitoring my desktop activity and there is hardly any when system is idle. Also the hdd temp doesn't vary much, unlike in Windows where AV would do scanning in background even though indexing has been turned off. Also in Jaunty, the Tracker tool has not been included and the earlier disk activity complaints in Intrepid have been non existent in Jaunty.

 

Tracker is a PITA.
Personally i use iotop to monitor disk activity per process and find the culprit.

 

Seems like a lot of hacking about to do most of what laptopmode does.

I follow this guide, treat Jaunty the same as Intrepid:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/PowerManagement

Then do the remainder of the settings in that link... IF you want to (I personally wouldnt to avoid breakage).

 

I doubt that there would be any effect on disk longevity. I've seen various apps in Win doing this over the years and most of the time nobody ever even notices. I wouldn't be concerned.

 

iotop isn't in the Hardy repos, so I installed it by adding this ppa:
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/tormodvolden/ubuntu hardy main
When PC idle I don't see anything untoward - the Disk Write is at 0 most of
the time. The 3.92 K/sec. in the screenshot was my network monitor screenlet.
The only other regular noticeable blip (also about 3.9) was due to kjournald.
I suppose it's OK..
Pleased to hear that Jaunty is less prone to this disc writing activity.
Will try chainloading Jaunty towards beg. June to see what all the hype
is about - running out of monthly bandwidth allocation for May.

 

Unnecessary disk activity is something that I always has been allergic to.
In windows I chose all my applications (HIPS, Firewall, Antivirus and so on) depending how little they grinded my hard drive. On top of that I killed all services that accessed the hard drive even when I wasnt using the computer (on 24/7)

I have had an open box for years so I dont have to stuff it with fans to keep it cool. Disk activity made alot of noice that I cant stand (when not using the computer).

So it was a big, big relief when I didnt have to do anything in Ubuntu to keep the noice down after the install, so I can not say that I understand what that article is refering to.. Definitely not my experience.

 

You can run iostat -x 5 100, this will poll your cpu and io every 5 sec a hundred times, the first line being the average since last boot. You can see the read/write results there. Check in different situations and see what gives. In general, disks are meant to be used ...

I got a few more apps to recommend - but an article is being brewed ...

Mrk

 

This was not my experience in Ubuntu either, I noticed no excess activity at all. I did notice much much more disk i/o when I ran XP. So for me, Ubuntu seemed pretty quiet.