which file system to use

[marc]

Tim Penhey said...
> On 8/3/06, Tom Smith <tom71713-ubuntu at yahoo.com> wrote:
> >
> > Just for the record, I prefer to have a balance of stability and
> > performance--but I hold stability in much higher regard than performance.
> > For this reason, I decided to continue using the tried and true ext3 file
> > system. It's been around a long time, has a proven track record of
> > reliability, and has robust and feature rich file system tools.
> >
> 
> Great, as long as you are not installing on a laptop.  As mentioned on an
> earlier thread, ext3 does disk access every 30 seconds, never allowing a
> laptop harddisk to spin down, and hence sucks the battery life.
> 
> Given that I'm about to install on my laptop, if not ext3, then what?

After moving my laptop from ext3 to reiserfs, I found that the disk 
would still not spindown. So, I tried:

  hdparm -S 12 /dev/sda

which did the trick. (The 12 represents 12 * 5 = 60 secs.)

-- 
Best,
Marc