Why hard drive spinning?

[Frank Fejes]

Hello. I have been curious about this for a while...why, when perhaps
no commands are being performed, or no text being entered, does the hard
drive spin every 10 seconds or so? I cannot imagine it being swap, as I
have 24MB RAM, and whenever I check 'free', no swap space is being utilized.
Any ideas, or better yet, answers? :) Thanks!

Frank S. Fejes | The University of Chicago | GSB Computing Services
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[Lou Sortman]

In article <D8vxC...@midway.uchicago.edu>,

Frank Fejes <fr...@woodward-88.rh.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> Hello. I have been curious about this for a while...why, when perhaps
>no commands are being performed, or no text being entered, does the hard
>drive spin every 10 seconds or so? I cannot imagine it being swap, as I
>have 24MB RAM, and whenever I check 'free', no swap space is being utilized.
>Any ideas, or better yet, answers? :) Thanks!

Well, heck! Mine spins the whole time my box is on.
It does make an odd seeking noise, perodically, as it recalibrates itself.
This is more on the order of minutes than seconds, though. It takes more than
10 seconds for my disk to spin up and then down.
It does it in DOS, too. I imagine it would probably do it if I merely
applied +12 and +5.
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l...@tfnet.ils.unc.edu (Lou Sortman) for(i=0; i<3; i++) puts(
"Janet! Dr. Scott! \n"
"Janet! Brad! \n"
Whoever dies with the most LEGO wins. "Rocky! <Uh!> \n");

[Douglas C. Holland]

In article <D8vxC...@midway.uchicago.edu>,
Frank Fejes <fr...@woodward-88.rh.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> Hello. I have been curious about this for a while...why, when perhaps
>no commands are being performed, or no text being entered, does the hard
>drive spin every 10 seconds or so? I cannot imagine it being swap, as I
>have 24MB RAM, and whenever I check 'free', no swap space is being utilized.
>Any ideas, or better yet, answers? :) Thanks!
>

> Frank S. Fejes | The University of Chicago | GSB Computing Services

It could be the sync program, which is run by crond every thirty seconds or so.
This flushes your disk-write buffers so the system doesn't get too lazy with
the lazy writing disk routines.

Doug

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Douglas C. Holland email: hol...@beethoven.cs.colostate.edu