HDD continually going

[Adam Lydick]

Bruce Muirhead wrote:
<snip>

> One issue which I have read about on the web forum without actually 
> finding anything useful (for me) is that the HDD seems to be going 
> almost continually. While there are times when this might be expected, 
> it seems to occur at all times that the machine is running.

<snip>

> Does anyone have any ideas on what where how and why I should start 
> looking now?

Check out this article on laptop mode:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/7539

I found the portion on spinup debugging to be pretty neat. When enabled, 
you get entries like the following dumped into syslog.

bash(273): READ block 3242 on hda1
bash(273): dirtied inode 10237 (.bash_history) on hda1
pdflush(6): WRITE block 3242 on hda1

I believe there is a utility that simplifies the setup. Otherwise you 
need to manually disable syslog (which also writes to disk) and parse 
out all of the interesting entries. The utility does all that in a 
single step and spits out a list of the offending processes.

Unfortunately, I can't remember the name of the utility and I didn't see 
it in my search history. Maybe someone else does?

- Adam