One user noticed that older IDE drives (CD, HDD) make noise, depending on age, case vibrations. His USB drive is very quiet. He boots grml from that.
Can he boot from USB without powering IDE drives? Grml has an orderly IDE power-off procedure at shutdown. You hear the IDE hard drives click off one by one. The question is best method to invoke the commands at boot time.
Of course he can always unplug the power cables manually :-) But customers don't like that. :-) Software control is better anyway.
Maybe this package can work:
noflushd
Description: allow idle hard disks to spin down
Noflushd is a daemon that spins down disks that have not been read from after a certain amount of time, and then prevents disk writes from spinning them back up. It's targeted for laptops but can be used on any computer with IDE disks. The effect is that the hard disk actually spins down, saving you battery power, and shutting off the loudest component of most computers.
At least it's a partial answer....
Mark
noflushd
[snip]
At least it's a partial answer....
But noflushd wants to remove laptop-mode-tools.
Check this out:
http://www.samwel.tk/laptop_mode/tools/faq.html Spinning Down May Kill Hard Drives
Desktop hard drives are usually rated for only 40,000-50,000 spinups, and one spinup every 10 minutes will kill your 40,000-spinup HD in 277 days. So this is NOT recommended for server use, unless you increase the spinup interval dramatically, to say once every hour or two. Laptop hard drives are usually rated for around 300,000 spinups, so those will last about 2083 days or 6 years if you have them powered on 24-7.
* Mark 27e3kk302@sneakemail.com [20061122 04:15]:
One user noticed that older IDE drives (CD, HDD) make noise, depending on age, case vibrations. His USB drive is very quiet. He boots grml from that.
Can he boot from USB without powering IDE drives? Grml has an orderly IDE power-off procedure at shutdown. You hear the IDE hard drives click off one by one. The question is best method to invoke the commands at boot time.
Of course he can always unplug the power cables manually :-) But customers don't like that. :-) Software control is better anyway.
Hm, what you want to get is "do not touch the ide drives at all"? Try booting with kernel parameters
ide1=noprobe ide2=noprobe ide3=noprobe ide4=noprobe
then.
regards, -mika-
Can he boot from USB without powering IDE drives? Grml has an orderly IDE power-off procedure at shutdown.
[snip]
Hm, what you want to get is "do not touch the ide drives at all"? Try booting with kernel parameters
ide1=noprobe ide2=noprobe ide3=noprobe ide4=noprobe
We want "don't power up IDE drives at all." BIOS may do that no matter what. So, next best option is "turn IDE drives off during grml startup." If drives don't spin they are quiet. We want the same power-off as grml does at shutdown, except we want it at bootup.
M.
* Mark 27e3kk302@sneakemail.com [20061127 05:15]:
Hm, what you want to get is "do not touch the ide drives at all"? Try booting with kernel parameters
ide1=noprobe ide2=noprobe ide3=noprobe ide4=noprobe
We want "don't power up IDE drives at all." BIOS may do that no matter what. So, next best option is "turn IDE drives off during grml startup." If drives don't spin they are quiet. We want the same power-off as grml does at shutdown, except we want it at bootup.
Ok, and did you try my tip?
regards, -mika-
Ok, and did you try my tip?
(Of course yes. Also disabling IDE buses from BIOS. Neither technique helped. The only software solution is telling disk firmware to power down. The firmware will always follow a fixed self-boot cycle. It must be instructed to park/shutoff. That is my interpretation.)
The best solution we found was "hdparm -Y /dev/hdX" (and /dev/cdrom). It works on hard disks if not all CD-ROMs.
The other noise is the power supply fan. Stock PCs offer no s/w fan control. Some PowerPC machines have it (although Ubuntu-PPC/Debian-PPC still has serious bugs).
http://www.silentpcreview.com http://www.endpcnoise.com
Mark
The best solution we found was "hdparm -Y /dev/hdX" (and /dev/cdrom). It works on hard disks if not all CD-ROMs.
P.S. Bug in grml 0.8-1
Shutdown procedure hangs at swapoff step when IDE drives are off. I did "swapoff -a" prior to "hdparm -Y ..." so should be problems.
The new 0.9rc1 grml has swap off by default (hooray!) so behavior may be different, but someone should test with 0/9rc1. Just do hdparm -Y /dev/hdX on all hard drives, "shutdown -h 0". Watch the output.
Mark
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Michael Prokop