From: chuckm@canada.hp.com (Chuck Munro) Subject: Re: Odd Hard Drive Noises under Linux Date: Wed, 4 Aug 1993 01:45:20 GMT
>>>a long, descending rattle like the heads are moving down or something.
>>>It finally stops after about 2 seconds maybe and then resumes normal
>>Sounds like a head reset. Happens after some (soft/hard?) error conditions
> I hope that this isn't the case...I'm hearing it too with my system.
> seems like some disk i/o is going on.
My system does this too, both when booted from an IDE disk and from a
SCSI drive. Does the noise happen at very regular intervals outside of
disk-intensive operations? If so, then you're hearing the disk-buffer
syncer doing its thing. At first it's annoying, because everything
appears to stop while this happens, but you get used to it.
There are more elegant disk-cache flushing schemes available which use
a LRU algorithm, but for small systems they're perhaps not worth the
development effort.
One of my earlier disk drives actually performed diagnostics on its own
after long periods of inactivity. This made a bit of noise, but happened
very infrequently. Some "smart" caching disk controllers (which you
should not be using under Linux) can also cause periodic activity.
Chuck.