I have an old laptop that I use as a server and I would like to reduce hard disk uptime. I have an idea how to go about this, but I wonder if I am overlooking something here. So the opinions and suggestions of you server experts out there would be much appreciated.
The reason for using a laptop as server is the low power consumption. Also, with the battery pack installed, it has its own UPS, which is nice to have. Thirdly, it serves only two simple tasks so a desktop system would be overkill. It logs temperature readings from my heating system once a minute and I use it to play music from my audio library, which is located on a USB-connected external drive. It is very convenient since the laptop is always on and requires me to hit just one button to start the music (and wake up the external drive).
Two weeks ago the system hard drive failed. When I installed a replacement drive I looked up its spec and was surprised that it was rated for only 3 years of operation. So now I want to reduce the uptime of the system drive, hoping that I will get a lot more than 3 years out of the laptop.
As for the temperature logging, data is trickling in every minute. Instead of writing it to the system drive I could write the data to a ramdisk and from there, move it to the system drive once a week. So instead of writing continuously to the HDD I would only need one HDD access per week. I am not concerned about loosing data from the ramdisk since I am using a laptop with its battery pack in place.
I used iotop to look what else there is that might keep the system drive from getting some rest and found the following “culprits”:
kjournald
gconfd-2
upowerd
kswapd0
python
I think python shows only because the iotop monitor is a python program. As for the rest, the daemons, I am not sure as to the longterm consequences (maybe even some risks?) if I disable/stop all of them, especially the journal and swap daemon.
Am I following a reasonable path or am I heading for disaster?
Thanks,
Hawkoon
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