Continuous hard drive access noise

12.10 hard-drive

5,057

You should use iotop to find out which process is doing I/O, and then decide if it's something you need or something you can live without, and remove it in the latter case.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/466496/how-to-find-the-process-which-is-cosuming-the-most-i-o-in-linux

5,057

calvin tiger

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

calvin tiger over 1 year

I have an Asus X201E netbook (with 2 GB of RAM) and Ubuntu 12.10.

The hard drive can almost always be heard being accessed, even when doing nothing. It is as if a search had been run on the entire drive, but this never stops. This is not "swapping" because the "free" command reports 900 MB of unused RAM and 0 MB of swap space used.

I am afraid that this is going to kill the HD prematurely. Any ideas where this could come from ?
- LtWorf almost 11 years
  
  How do you know it's swapping and it's not some processes doing something on the background? Have you checked the output of "free" to see how much swap is in use?
- calvin tiger almost 11 years
  
  "swapping" is actually not the correct word. "free" tells me that 900 MB of RAM is unused, and none of the Swap is used.
- LtWorf almost 11 years
  
  So it's not swapping. That said, probably you have some process doing a lot of I/O. For example if you are downloading torrent, it's quite normal to hear the disk often.
- calvin tiger almost 11 years
  
  It's interesting to note that the noise pattern is not constant, as if it was actually doing /something/.
- chaskes almost 11 years
  
  Are you sure it's the hard drive? Is the hard drive light on or flashing? The fan has a sound a strange sound that does not sound like a fan at all.
calvin tiger almost 11 years

According to iotop, the only process that seems to be doing some HD I/O (write only, it seems) is jbd2/sda4-8, but most of the times it doesn't even appear - and the HD noise is heard at all times, even when iotop reports ZERO hard drive activity.
calvin tiger almost 11 years

No, mine is an Hitachi HTS54503. And you'll have to admit that disabling power management is not an optimal solution :/
calvin tiger almost 11 years

I tried hdparm -B 255 /dev/sda (also with the value 254, as indicated by the page you recommended), and this didn't have any effect on the noise.
Meer Borg almost 11 years

I went trough quite a few params before it worked for me, but it might not be the issue. Although no hard disk activity from the other answer tends to lead to parking issue. In the old days I would say your drive had a bearingbball issue but those things are rarer these days
Meer Borg almost 11 years

You might also want to check if your drive has SMART technology which stores information about the drives health. That gives data like errors of the drive and other issues askubuntu.com/questions/20393/…
calvin tiger almost 11 years

I did a SMART check and there is nothing wrong to report...
calvin tiger almost 11 years

I did a SMART check and there is nothing wrong to report...
Meer Borg almost 11 years

Does this problem occur when you are at the boot screen? That is before you have even started Ubuntu. Or does it only kick in when Ubuntu is loaded?
calvin tiger almost 11 years

Good point. Well, it seems to be occurring even at the boot screen, even when I am in the system setup. In the latter case,the HD access LED doesn't light up but the noise is heard. Do you think my HD might be damaged ?
LtWorf almost 11 years

SMART is not the solution to all the problems. In any case if the OS doesn't report activity, I'd say it's the hardware.
Meer Borg almost 11 years

Yes, thats why I asked the question :)
Vijay Kumar Kanta over 6 years

So much for free software Ubuntu