1
Recently a buddy of mine has pointed out in his blog (in Russian) that hard drives that use the ext3 filesystem can not be spun down because of the need to frequently write data. According to him, it is caused by the way the ext3 filesystem is implemented.
Is it actually true? Isn't there some way to use hard drive spin-down function when there is no data written and read from the disk? And by that I mean not some one-time manual spin-down, but a constantly running power-saving application of some sort.
It may be worth noting that I'm using Ubuntu, but it may be not that relevant to the matter.
2The ext filesystem has been obsolete since 1993. All current systems use either ext3 or ext4 (or something entirely different), and the blog post is about ext3. – user1686 – 2011-09-05T10:23:46.217
Also, I'm somewhat clueless about this kind of issues, but my laptop has ext4, btrfs and fat32 partitions, and automatic disk spindown is working fine with "laptop_mode". It somewhat depends on the mount options used, but ext3/4 with default settings certainly do not write continuously -- only when a file is changed, and even that gets cached for some time. – user1686 – 2011-09-05T10:27:39.783