shutdown of harddisk to reduce powerconsumption

[rbalasus]

shutdown of harddisk to reduce powerconsumption

Hello, I own a server in a housing center, and now it is required for me to reduce the powerconsumption to pay a less monthly rate.
The Server is a P4 2GHZ with two harddisks in a raid array there is a hardware raid controller from 3ware.

The server is only used for displaying a webpage.

I remember some years ago there I was playing with hdparm options to set an inactivity timer 10min.
It seems to work as expected , whenever I had a look to the harddrive it was spinned down. But as I was looking deeper, this was a whole disaster, the harddisk was spinnning up and down 500 times a day.
The reason for this was the journaling of the file system. It seems that all 5 minutes there where some bytes to be writed down to the harddisk.

I think the most efficient way to reduce the powerconsumption is tuning up the harddisk power management modes.
Is there an easy to do the same with the cpu?

Is there a modern way to make this task?
What is for a filesystem required?
are some special options in the kernel required? (and what for hdparm options)

Regards Randolf Balasus

[avx]

If possible, try shifting as much as possible from disk->ram. Log into ram, or if you don't need logging, turn it off completly. If it's just static webpages or more precise, non-interactive as in no forum/shoutbox or the like, try moving the db into memory, too. If it's interactive, think about what's more important, data-loss in case of powerfailure or a system crash or powersaving.

[Hu]

How much RAM do you have available in the system? What is the output of nl /proc/mounts?

You may be able to discourage some disk access by mounting the filesystems read-only, but this could impact application behavior.

[rbalasus]

Hello,
1GB Ram and only two partitions (root/swap), thats all...
at this time server is in installation procedure....