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Very active Hard Drive.

Orville Carter

Very active Hard Drive.
« on: July 27, 2000, 07:23:45 AM »
We have just finished installing E-Smith 4.0 (final) on a dual 366 PII/512k machine.
The system installed without errors (Really? Ha!). This pc will replace our
233MHz internet server.
However, I noticed some intense drive activity after the e-smith console appears. This continued for about 15 to 30 seconds. The old 233 running e-smith 4.07b did not
exhibit these signs. Hard drives on each system are all 10 Gig SCSI.

I am just curious. Why? Hardware dual PII 366 /512k, 64 Meg, SCSI HD& CD-ROM,
Trident PCI video w/4Meg. Intel based Motherboard. One 10/100Mbs card is built into the motherboard, the second is 10Mbs NE2000 type in PCI slot.

Colin Mattoon

RE: Very active Hard Drive.
« Reply #1 on: July 27, 2000, 05:47:17 PM »
I don't know why, but I don't think it is related to your hardware because I ran into the same thing on a P120 with 32 MB, a MII 200 with 32 MB and a 486 DX 66 with 16 MB.  All have IDE drives and, being slower than your machine, exhibit this for 30 to 60 seconds.

Perhaps it is a feature intended to increase hard drive sales :-)

Charlie Brady

RE: Very active Hard Drive.
« Reply #2 on: July 27, 2000, 10:03:22 PM »
Orville Carter wrote:

> We have just finished installing E-Smith 4.0 (final) on a dual
> 366 PII/512k machine. The system installed without errors
> (Really? Ha!). This pc will replace our 233MHz internet server.
> However, I noticed some intense drive activity after the
> e-smith console appears. This continued for about 15 to 30
> seconds. The old 233 running e-smith 4.07b did not exhibit
> these signs.

This most likely to be squid initialising its cache. It does this only the first time that it is run after installation. It needs to create a large set of directories, and this hits the disk hard.  It's quite normal, and unavoidable.

Regards

Charlie

Orville Carter

RE: Very active Hard Drive.
« Reply #3 on: July 28, 2000, 07:02:09 PM »
Hey Charlie,

You are right! We installed e-smith on an emergency scsi drive and noticed the same
intense drive activity after first restart.

Yeah! We find its neat to have a couple of scsi drives in storage - with e-smith
already configured. After a 48 hour "burn-in on the lan the scsi drive is stored.
It saves a lot of time if a system drive goes down - or
if we want to bring another system on line FAST.