HDD Red activity light is on constantly---

elzorro · 2012-01-17 06:59:33

Why when I run arch is the HDD red disk activity light always on.
Is it an arch thing or is the drive failing or what.
Does not look good.
Regards
El Zorro

Last edited by elzorro (2012-01-17 07:01:05)

ewaller · 2012-01-17 07:06:20

Well, from your other posts, I know you are running KDE.

I'll bet Nepomuk is indexing your files. Take a look at your activity monitor or htop for clues as to what processes are busy. Also, check out iotop

What happens if you disable file indexing in your KDE system settings -> Desktop Search ?

elzorro · 2012-01-17 07:45:57

You were right ewaller,
both strigi and nepomuk were indexing so I disabled them both, hopefully this is OK, and now the hdd red light only flickers periodically.
Guess that furious indexing that seemed not to stop could overwork the drive and make it fail early.
What do you think
regards
El Zorro

ewaller wrote:

Well, from your other posts, I know you are running KDE.
I'll bet Nepomuk is indexing your files. Take a look at your activity monitor or htop for clues as to what processes are busy. Also, check out iotop
What happens if you disable file indexing in your KDE system settings -> Desktop Search ?

ewaller · 2012-01-17 15:59:30

elzorro wrote:

...both strigi and nepomuk were indexing so I disabled them both, hopefully this is OK,... Guess that furious indexing that seemed not to stop could overwork the drive and make it fail early.

Personally, I don't often have the need to find a file by it's contents, so I turn off Stirgi. I leave Nepomuk on. If you do nothing and leave them both on, the system should finsh indexing -- eventually My home directory has a lot of source files, including the source for the kernel. Indexing all that takes about a day. If you turn on Strigi, you can use the advanced settings to limit its search to specific directories. You can also filter by file type. I am always hit by the known bug in which indexing gets hung up in certain pdf files and runs one of my CPUs up to 100% until I kill it.

Disk drives are pretty reliable, I don't worry (much) about excess disk activity being a serious risk to the drive. I do dislike serious disk activity because it impacts the responsiveness of my system and because it has a serious impact on power consumption (usually because there is some code actively running that needs to be fed data by that disk activity).

Arch Linux

#1 2012-01-17 06:59:33

HDD Red activity light is on constantly---

#2 2012-01-17 07:06:20

Re: HDD Red activity light is on constantly---

#3 2012-01-17 07:45:57

Re: HDD Red activity light is on constantly---

#4 2012-01-17 15:59:30

Re: HDD Red activity light is on constantly---

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