I've noticed that something is accessing the disk around every 10 seconds on my knoppmyth frontend R5A26 (frontend only not running mysql or mythbackend).

I used to run a hard drive so it wasn't a major problem, now I have reinstalled using a 2GB IDE flash disk and I'm worried that the constant access is going to kill the flash drive fairly quickly (flash drives are only good for a couple of hundred thousand reads and writes).

I could also never put my hard disk to sleep on my old machine which was a bit of a pain as it kept waking up to access the disk for something.

any ideas what this could be, I've checked top and there is nothing obvious, fam isn't popping up on top at all but I can't put a nail on exactly what is doing it. The only process that spikes when i'm watching it is sshd but it doesn't match up with the disk access.

Regards
Toby Mills

Maybe you should switch to the ext2 file system. I think ext3 is not well suited for flash ram, because it's a journaling file system.
I wonder how much disk space is really necessary for a frontend. Could you squeeze it on a 512MB stick? How much is left on your 2GB drive?

I thought flash drives were unlimited reads, but 100,000 writes? If the box is only reading from the disk then you should be ok

I've noticed this too. I even had a problem that a second mounted disk (unused except for backups) would spin up about 10 seconds after being suspended, so I suspect it is journal related as mentioned above. I fixed the problem by unmounting the disk after suspend, but this obviously won't work in your case.

Converting to ext2 might help. Another interesting solution (but much more work) would be to change the system to boot onto a RAM disk and then unmount the flash drive. I think this is what happens when you boot from the Knoppmyth CD.

Cheers,

Allen

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ASUS AT3N7A-I (Atom 330)
TBS 8922 PCI (DVB-S2)

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