Hard drive is too active

[TarrasQ]

I gave up my old parallel-ATA drives and did a fresh F9 install on a new SATA hard drive. Now I can see the disk activity led flash and a short sound from the HD about every few seconds. It almost never has a longer break.

I don't have beagle installed and the activity starts right away after boot. It's not the system swapping, at least there's over 1.5 GB free mem and /proc/swaps tells me swap isn't being used. What's going on? It's getting a little annoying and scary...

[marko]

Look in /var/log for the newest log files and "tail" the newest one:

ls -ltr /var/log

to list the files in the log directory in reverse time order, the last file is
newest. Suppose that file is "logfile", then monitor it via tail -f:

tail -f /var/log/logfile

and see if you get a warning or error message over and over.
If that doesn't show anything obvious, install the sysstat package
and use the iostat tool that's in it to prove to yourself that
there are actually blocks being read and written to disk. It's possible
the drive light is just smartd constantly querying the drive for
health info (that's only an explanation if you're only imagining the
drive sound).

[TarrasQ]

I think I got the reason now. There really was frequent write operations to mount point / and it was about the same pace as new entries to /var/log/messages...

About 90% of the writes were actually firewall logs being added to messages. Looks like I've started taking hits from some wintendo worm or two. For example port 135 seems to be a favorite.

After shutting down the Internet-connected interface HD activity calmed down.

Thanks! Now I know what it is and can start thinking about ways to deal with it.

[eliashickman]

This isn't entirely related to your thread, but I just wanted to pass the joy of this wonderful little tool on.
Since I have 6 SATA hard disks in my tower and not all are being accessed all of the time, I use a utility called Spindown. You may already know about this, but in case you don't, it will greatly help reduce your overall power consumption by spining down disks (not partitions) that don't recieve as frequent attention.
It's really easy to compile, only requiring sg_utils and sets up a /etc/init.d script that will let you check the status of it regularly.
When I first started using it, I didn't believe that it was working until I had to use gparted to check something out and heard the two disks that I don't currently use fire up.

Anyway, I don't know if being a spokesman in the forum is allowed but if you're curious you can download it here.
http://linux.softpedia.com/get/Syste...wn-37597.shtml

[marko]

Another good tool to find active files would be lsof,
if you monitor the "SIZE" column, then you can see
open files that are getting bigger. It doesn't help as
much with a file that's being read a lot, the file might
not change size at all but still be the cause of lots of disk
activity. What would really be more useful would be a
way to get lsof to time sort the files as to
last read or write time but I don't see a way to
do that.

[Hlingler]

Yet another tool to find the cause(s) of high HDD acsess is powertop. I use it after every boot to adjust/turn off stuff that's causing excessive HDD access.

V

EDIT: BTW, hdparm, which should be installed by default, can also be used to set HDD spin-down time(s).
See here also for tips on disabling unnecessary services: http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-services-f9.html