Tracking HD activity

[Giles Orr]

On Nov 13, 2007 3:42 PM, Ian Petersen <ispeters-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Nov 13, 2007 3:30 PM, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > Could be gnome or kde running some volume manager or mount deamon
> > polling the cd/dvd for inserted disks every second.  That would make the
> > light flash.  After all the light doesn't mean hard disk activity, but
> > rather disk controller activity.
>
> I think the HAL does that.  I discovered this little tidbit about the
> HAL when running powertop.  There's a way to turn it off, but I forget
> what the command is.  If you run powertop, and if that's the source of
> the activity, then powertop will tell you how to stop it.  I think the
> instructions are also available here:
> http://www.lesswatts.org/tips/disks.php

Thanks to everyone who had suggestions on this one, and particularly
to Ian because HAL was it: I killed HAL entirely, and strangely, that
caused my HDs to have I/O errors and not work at all (but the light
stopped flashing) ...  So I rebooted and ran the command

   # hal-disable-polling --device /dev/hdX

for each of the removable media drives, and voila!  Flashing light went away.

-- 
Giles
http://www.gilesorr.com/
gilesorr-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org
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