Bill Sommerfeld writes:
> For maximal battery life on portables, you really want to keep the
> disk spun down as much as possible.  Unfortunately, various things
> conspire to make this difficult unless you turn off the "update"
> program..
> 
> Here are two ideas for improving the current situation:
> 
> 	1) change `/sbin/update' to let the time-between-syncs be a
> 	   configurable parameter.  On laptops, you have your own
> 	   UPS, so letting users change the period to 5 or 10 minutes
> 	   instead of 30 seconds would be reasonable.

I'd say that better than this, one should add a compile time option to
the kernel so that it doesn't try to update the timestamp on the
superblocks every thirty seconds if there has been no other disk
activity.

Perhaps the APM patches already do some of this, though, since I have
noticed that my disks do indeed sleep if they aren't touched.

Perry