a change in kernel version 2.6.27-r5 (i think) in the journaling daemon creates disk activity on a otherwise idle disk (i.e. mounted ext3 fs with no activity). so the unused disk never goes idle. going back to latest stable gentoo-sources-2.6.24-r4 to let the disk spin down again. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. mount a disk with options noatime,commit=<high value>, filesystem ext3 2. set idle timer on above disk with hdparm -S .. 3. create activity on another disk with journaling file system Actual Results: disk in step 1 never spins down Expected Results: disk in step 1 should spin down see kernel bug 12224 at http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12224 there's already a patch, which should be ported to gentoo.
http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff_plain;h=02ac597c9b86af49b2016aa98aee20ab59dbf0d2 http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2.6.git;a=commitdiff_plain;h=8fe4cd0dc5ea43760c59eb256404188272cc95dd
Released in gentoo-sources-2.6.28-r3
