hard disk spindown--noflushd not successful

[A R]

I find that I am unable to get the hard disk
to spin down for any significant period of time
with YDL 3.0.  I was able to do so in YDL 2.3.

I installed noflushd-2.5-1
Mounted all partitions with ext2 and noatime
Put "-" in front of all file names in /etc/syslog.conf

This results in noflushd spinning down hard disk
with it spinning up again in 5 seconds.  Like
clockwork.
This is of course useless and perhaps more wearing
to the disk than remaining active.

I then killed stopped syslogd and klogd using
/etc/rc.d/init.d/syslog stop

I also killed crond and anacrond.
This gives spindown, followed by spinup after 4
minutes
at most.  Much better than 5 seconds, but much
worse than YDL 2.3+noflushd (hours of spindown)

I suspect that bdflush and update are to blame.
My /proc/sys/vm/bdflush currently contains
30      500     0       0       0       60000   99    
 20      0 (all on one line)

I set the 6th parameter to 60000 (= 10 minutes that
dirty file buffers can exist)

I tried to set the 7th parameter higher than 100,
but it is not accepted.  So I think that when a
non-file buffer becomes dirty, it is flushed 
right away.  

Any other suggestions for how to get more than
4 minutes of spindown time?

Thanks!
Andrew





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