Continuous hard drive access noise

Question

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 ?

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

2

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

edited May 23 '17 at 12:39

Community

1

answered Apr 28 '13 at 12:07

LtWorf

220

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Apr 28 '13 at 12:15

I had this issue with my Laptop and I tried everything but in the end I found it was a Toshiba drive. The Toshiba drives have a problem with the park option and it goes haywire and continiously tries to park the drive and that is the noise you are hearing.

http://disablehddapm.blogspot.com.au/2011/12/disabling-hard-disk-drive-advanced.html

The solution is to disable the power management, although that will decrease battery life. This worked for my drive but as you haven't told us what drive you have this solution might not work and needs a different parameter set.

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Mar 02 '15 at 04:59

I had the same problem. More or less by accident, I noticed that whenever I had GMail open in a browser, a rattling hard drive would be the result. In my case, if GMail would be running in Google Chrome, Opera, Safari or Vivaldi, it would result in constant rattling. In Firefox, it would still cause some hard drive access. I ended up with Midori, and now my hard drive no longer makes a lot of noise.

Continuous hard drive access noise

3 Answers3