Bugzilla – Bug 115795
Disk light flickers during idle on eMachines 6260 (AMD Athlon 64 on MSI 7093)
Last modified: 2005-09-12 09:47:57 UTC
Disk light flicks on every second or so (flick,flick,sleep) when the machine is idle. A similar flick, but different pattern occurs in XP. If you put your head to the case you can hear the disk arm move every twenty seconds. It occurs in 64 bit suse 9.3 and 10beta4 and XP, but not 32 bit. a) what's going on? b) does it matter? Probably stops the disk sleeping, and wears the arm out.
This might just be normal (disk cache being flushed, ...), but to be sure please provide 500 lines of your syslog and attach the file: % tail -500 /var/log/messages > syslog.txt If there is some kind of problem it will probably be logged there.
Created attachment 49506 [details] tail -500 /va/log/messages
Interestingly when I installed 10rc1 I get a different pattern of flick. It now goes "flick, sleep" rather than "flick, flick, sleep". XP does "flick, sleep" too.
Frankly I'm at a loss right now. This might just be a hardware-dependent problem. The system log does also not provide the right clue, though it contains a lot of errors. You're running smartd i.e., disable it and check if the error is still occouring. As you pointed out that this problem exists unter Windows XP either, I cannot see that this is a kernel- or Linux-problem at all. I'm closing this bug. If you have prove that I'm in error, reopen the bug and provide the neccessary information. Sorry. P.S. Furthermore: This would be really hard to locate and does not influence either the stability nor the performance of your system.