I found that this topic has been asked before but don't see where anyone solved it so here goes...
I have a remote FE running up in the bedroom. Since it is a slooow celeron, I leave it running 24/7 to avoid the long bootup. Everthing works well except for at night when all the house is asleep you can hear the hard drive ticking away.
I have tried using hdparm -y and -Y but the drive always spins back up within 10 seconds. I would really like to have a way to put it to sleep or better yet to timeout after 20 minutes.
It appears that something is accessing the drive but I can't figure out what. Mythbackend is not running and even if I shutdown the frontend, I get the disk access and the spin up.
Does anyone know what is accessing the drive or is there a way to find out what is?

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LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote

My (relatively limited) experience with linux is that the OS is always doing something. My HDD light (whether on my Mythbox or my separate non myth machine) is constantly blinking for some reason or another.

UNIX-y boxes tend to have fairly regular background activity. For instance, syslogd writes a marker to its files every 20 minutes in a default KM install. Cron fires off a process at least hourly that could result in disk writes.

You could try something like noflushd to get around the frequent disk writes. There's also something called 'laptop mode' in the 2.6 linux kernels; it has some similar functionality for delaying disk writes.

There's some FAQ type material here; see section 5 for info on debugging disk activity.

Bene, the laptop tools looks interesting enough to give it a try this weekend. Thanks for the tip and I will report back on my sucesses (or failures )

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LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote

Well good news here. I wget'ed the debian package from
http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsamwel/laptop_mo ... ebian.html
and following the instruction included, I was able to get this working in 15 minutes. The only extra thing that I had to do was to modify the laptop-mode.conf file to enable the spindown to happen on AC power (remember this was originally for saving battery power on laptops).

In any case it works as advertised. After 5 minutes the disk spun down. It stayed that way until I flipped through 3 menu items. I watched a recording and by the time I was done watching, the disk had gone to sleep again.

Thanks for your help!

_________________
LINHES 8.6.1 BE/FE - MSI K9N6SGM-V with AMD A64 X2 4600+, 4GB Ram. 1.5TB WD. HDHR Prime. Nvidia GT210. MCE remote.
FrontEnd - Dell Vostro 400 3.0GHz Core2Duo NVidia GeForce210. MCE Remote