I bought a new computer about 6 months ago to run openSUSE 10,3, 64 bit. Whenever I shut the machine down, the two SATA hard disks make a loud clacking noise. Not having used Samsung disks before, I thought that was probably normal for them.
However, I’ve recently installed an old IDE disk (it shows up as /dev/sdc for some reason I don’t quite understand) and this too is making the same noise. Since it was perfectly quiet in the computer I took it from, I suspect something is wrong.
Something else I’ve noticed is that the noise seems a lot louder recently, possibly since upgrading to the 2.6.22.18-0.2 kernel.
A bit of Googling found several references to a problem with disk shutdown, whereby this type of noise could be caused by the power being cut to the disks before the disk had been told to shut down. For example:
Serial ATA (SATA) shutdown info
and
Disk might not be spun down properly. Update shutdown utility - LinuxQuestions.org
The implication is that this could be harming my disks, so I’d like to get it sorted out. It sounds very much like the problem I have, but it is meant to be fixed in 2.6.22 kernels. However, it seems to depend on the distro and whether the “shutdown” command is right for the kernel. Neither of the above pages mentions SUSE.
So my question is: can anyone shed any light on whether this problem is present in openSUSE 10.3/64 bit with the 2.6.22.18-0.2 kernel. Also, how can I be sure this is the problem and how can I fix it?
Many thanks.