[mythtv-users] Unusual hard drive activity w/ livetv

[Brian Wood]

On Jan 17, 2006, at 10:05 PM, Jason Richardson wrote:

> Hello.
> I have recently installed mythtv on a gentoo system (after being
> unhappy with a knoppmyth setup) and have everything working great.
> The problem is that whenever I watch live tv, the hard drive goes
> nuts, and continues doing so until live tv is stopped. it plays/pauses
> etc and works just fine, but the noise that the drive makes is quite
> annoying.
> Yes i know a ringbuffer is used, but I have configured myth to put
> that on a different hard drive (one that isnt nearly as loud!) so I
> dont understand why it is still hammering on that particular drive.
> And yes i know which drive it is because i monitored the activity
> lights for each drive seperately. The drive i put the ringbuffer on
> does show activity, but not nearly so much as the other drive.
> Any ideas what I should do to determine what file(s) it is accessing,
> so that i can change the path to point to the other drive? or any
> other ideas as to what it might be doing?
> Thanks.

lsof will show you open files (you'll need to emerge it on a Gentoo  
system). Mounting filesystems with the "noatime" parameter (in /etc/ 
fstab) will reduce drive access as the time will not be stamped for  
every access.