[mythtv-users] Hard disk access

[Michael T. Dean]

Mike Grusin wrote:

>I've been wondering this myself ever since I got my FE+BE box running.  The
>hard drive light blinks approximately every second when it's "not doing
>anything" (which doesn't happen much anymore ;)  According to system
>information in Myth, almost all of the RAM is being used (512M), but none of
>the swap, so the drive access always puzzled me.
>  
>
You're almost definitely running programs that are constantly writing 
data to disk (i.e. syslogd/syslog-ng).  By default, Linux will try to 
dump that data to the disk (because volatile RAM is an unsafe place for 
storage--reliability over quiet/hardware-life).

However, you can configure a "Laptop Mode" and set the amount of time 
the kernel should wait before flushing these buffers.  You'll also want 
to modify the way filesystem access times are handled (i.e. turn off 
access time updates, etc.).

http://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/stirling/computergeek/powersaving.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7539

And, if you want to understand what's happening, read the articles 
linked from these two articles...

Mike