[gentoo-amd64] Need advice on spin-down harddisk.

["P.V.Anthony" <pvantony@singnet.com.sg>]

Hi again,

I am building a fileserver for our studio. The files going to be stored 
are audio files. Most will be in aiff, wav and mp3 files.

I am using a software raid 5 over 15 drives. Using Western Digital 
drives because the sales man said that they are quieter.

My setting for chuck size is 256K. Using ext3 for the filesystem. When 
creating the filesystem, the setting used was -b 4096 and -E stride=64.

**Is the stride setting of 64 correct?

We need the noise of the server to be as quite as possible. The speed of 
the server is not the most important issue.

The cpu is Intel Core 2 duo. In the make.conf file the 
ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="amd64". I was thinking of using some cpu frequency 
reducing application when there is no much access to the server. Plus I 
hope it will save some electricity.

**Please advice if that is a good idea. If so which application should I 
use for the Intel Core 2 Duo running at 1.8. Some applications from the 
gentoo site are cpudyn, cpufreq, speedfreq and powernowd. Please advice 
which is most useful for this server.

Last but not the least is the spinning down of the hard disk.

**Is it a good idea to spin down the hard disk during low use? Will it 
spoil the hard disk? If it is a good idea, please let me know what is a 
good application to use.

Requesting help to make some decisions on this. Please help where you can.

P.V.Anthony


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