Excessive Repetitive Disk Activity

Support & Help Requests
#1

UPDATE: Seems to be occurring even when the machine is locked and presumably idle, although it doesn't seem quite as excessive in this state.

While I'm actively logged in, I'm experiencing repeated disk activity, every few seconds. It doesn't seem to matter which or how many applications I'm running. I've checked iotop, and I see occasional activity from jdb2 and kworker, but it doesn't seem to coincide with the disk activity I hear.

When I lock the machine, the repetitive disk activity eventually (in a few minutes) subsides to occasional.

Any ideas for other things I can check?

Hardware:

  • Ryzen 3 3200G processor
  • Gigabyte B450M DS3H motherboard
  • 32GB RAM
  • Two SATA drives: primary is a Seagate 2TB (6Gb/s 7200 RPM 256MB Cache 3.5-Inch (ST2000DM008)), second is a Western Digital 2TB (5400 RPM Class, 6 Gb/s, 256 MB Cache, 3.5" - WD20EZAZ)
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#2

Welcome! Was this something that just started happening - which :ubuntu_mate: release? Both your drives, or just one of them?

If iotop isn't revealing a software process that's causing disk activity, it could just be the hardware performing maintenance on itself. You could check S.M.A.R.T. data (within :harddrive: GNOME Disks) in case it's the same sounds during a self test.

Just recently, I've been puzzled why my dad's PC with a 2 TB HDD constantly "thrashes" when it's idle, even when the SATA data cable was unplugged! You might want to see if the drive(s) continue to have disk activity with the drive's data cable unplugged or just sitting at a BIOS screen for some time, just to rule out hardware.

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#3

It's a brand new drive, and I noticed it as soon as I started using it. I've loaded the MATE 20.04 release on it.

I did notice something. I did an informal test where I copied several GB of files from one location to another on each drive, and the 1st drive (the one I reported as having excessive activity) is considerably noisier than the 2nd. So now I'm actually not sure if it's really excessive activity, or if I'm just noticing it more because it's so loud.

It's interesting that you mention having it sit at the BIOS screen. I do notice some activity on the drive when I'm on the BIOS screen.

I'm considering just switching to a SSD for my primary drive to see if that helps.

#4

Oh, boy. I just noticed something troubling in the S.M.A.R.T. data attributes. On the 2nd drive, the Read Error and Seek Error Rate values are 0 and 0. On the 1st (noisy) drive, the values are 85145014 and 9507869, respectively. :anguished:

#5

But, the Assessment values for each of those is "OK". :confused:

#6

It could be a problem with the drive firmware. I encountered a drive that would do continual load and unload of the r/w heads. You could watch the smart value "193 - load cycle count" going up and up. I upgraded the drive firmware to stop the unnecessary head load cycles. Yes, the drive would make noise on the bench just powered up with no host connection.

Concerning the "Read Error" and "Seek Error" values: I have drives that have been in continuous operation for many years with read and seek errors much higher than your values. The SMART values to watch are 5 - Reallocated Sector Count, 196 - Reallocated Event Count, and 197 - Current Pending Sector. Current Pending Sector should always be 0. Reallocated Sector Counts up to 64 are probably OK on a very old drive.

djb

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#7

This has been a perennial issue, which you can validate with a Google search. A kworker and a systemd-journald thread will write like mad to your HD, most fervently when your system is idle. No one seems to have ever come up with an answer worthy of a green check mark. My uneducated guess is that the kworker (kernel worker) thread is constantly working to defrag the drive.