I haven’t been used to orrdinary spun HDs for years now, but I decided for one in my NextBox, thinking I’d add more storage around by myself. So I rediscovered HD vibration and even little clicks that I long had forgotten.
I have a mild worry, though : this HD never stops spinning.
I know Linux itself regularly writes to logs etc. but still, I somehow expected a kind of timeout that’d sleep it, all the more as some key Linux components 'maybe the most ‘talkative’ ons?) stay on the small disk on the Raspberry.
But I also know that too many spinups will wear the disk too.
So, just a quick question : is this ‘permanent spin’ behavior normal? anything I can do to alleviate it? (maybe adding external storage?)
yes, this is the outcome of the trade-off between writing logs to sd-card vs. onto the internal hard-drive.
The two main “writers” are likely journald and the nextbox-daemon…
journald can be motivated to keep logs only in memory and the nextbox-daemon is currently still in debug-log-level, thus also writing more than needed. The latter (nextbox-daemon) will have reduced logging in “some weeks”, in detail we will allow the user to set the log level, thus the amount and frequency of writes.
The short answer is: no currently not, in the (not-so-far) future there will be options for the user to reduce the load. But for now this is intended and not a problem.
