# Reducing drive access



## Hornpipe2 (Apr 16, 2009)

Hey all - new user here (got Linux experience though).  I'm trying to build a combination gateway/router + server machine.  It's an older PC and the various components are rather loud.  But I figure, since I get very infrequent web hits and don't generally *need* heavy disk access, I could set my spindown time to something very short (30 seconds) and find ways to limit drive hits so it stays off as much as possible.

The first problem I'm running into though is that as soon as my drive spins down, FreeBSD wants to log the event - causing disk access and a spin-up to write the result!

```
Apr 15 22:32:28 nwserver kernel: ad0: Idle, spin down
Apr 15 22:32:30 nwserver kernel: ad0: request while spun down, starting.
Apr 15 22:32:30 nwserver kernel: ad0: drive spun down.
Apr 15 22:32:59 nwserver kernel: ad0: Idle, spin down
Apr 15 22:32:59 nwserver kernel: ad0: request while spun down, starting.
Apr 15 22:33:01 nwserver kernel: ad0: drive spun down.
```
Is there a way I can get FreeBSD to either stop writing this info, cache it to RAM until the drive is spinning again, or something along those lines?


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## vermaden (Apr 16, 2009)

You can for sure creata a RAMDISK for your whole router and run it from there, you can also disable logging by linking logs to /dev/null, but I do not know any property that would delay writes to tour needs, generally SoftUpdates writes everything with 30 seconds delay if I recall corectly, you may want to edit source code here and put for example 300-600 seconds delay there.


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