From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Mar 30 9:11:36 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from pine.pinetel.com (pine.pinetel.com [143.227.44.106]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 73AD837B71E for ; Fri, 30 Mar 2001 09:11:31 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from hweaver@pinetel.com) Received: from pinetel.com (ip75-cu2.pinetel.com [143.227.42.75]) by pine.pinetel.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id JAA02262; Fri, 30 Mar 2001 09:11:27 -0800 (PST) Message-ID: <3AC4BD55.C6D3D396@pinetel.com> Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2001 09:07:33 -0800 From: Hal Weaver X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (X11; U; FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE i386) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Kris Kennaway Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Slow, noisey hard drive activity References: <3AC3A738.B73B0404@pinetel.com> <20010329132719.B7195@xor.obsecurity.org> <3AC3F8FB.DD01EDFE@pinetel.com> <20010329210511.A11145@xor.obsecurity.org> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Kris Kennaway wrote: > > On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 07:09:47PM -0800, Hal Weaver wrote: > > Kris Kennaway wrote: > > > > > > On Thu, Mar 29, 2001 at 01:20:56PM -0800, Hal Weaver wrote: > > > > I've installed the following FreeBSD release on two different removable > > > > hard drives used in the same laptop (IBM Thinkpad 760 ED): > > > > -------------------------------------------------- > > > > # uname -a > > Kris, I made twp identical fbsd installations: > > 1. on a 1.2G hard drive where fbsd uses the entire drive. Here hard > > drive access is fast and quiet. > > 2. on a 5G hard drive where fbsd uses only half the drive. Other OSs > > share the rest of the drive. This is the problem installation for > > fbsd. The other OSs both have quiet, fast disk access on this drive. > > > > Conclusion: softupdates status would be the same on both disks; enabled, > > I think. So I don't think that this problem involves softupdates > > status. > > Insufficient data to form that conclusion. Your drives are different, > so have different characteristics, and the other OSes use different > disk write strategies that FreeBSD as already explained. > > I might be wrong, but you need to test it to rule out my hypothesis ;-) Well put, Kris! I'm a newbie and in over my head in this Unix thing. But I'm far enough along to realize that FreeBSD is less frustrating than the Linux distributions I've tried: Red Hat 5.1, SuSE 6.3, and Slackware 7.1. It has fewer surprises, and better support -- as evidenced by this conversation. I'll find out where the softupdates are enable/disabled and try the alternative. Thanks. Hal To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message