HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

grim-reaper · 2021-05-19 06:45:48

Three days ago I installed Arch Linux in my SSD. And I mounted partitions of HDD to some directories of my user home directory. And after that I noticed that my hdd had started heating up quite a bit with temps reaching as high as 50°C (checked using hddtemp). And then I dual booted windows with windows in hdd (for gaming valorant and rocket league). So when I'm booted in windows hdd temps remain normal and there is barely any vibration which I'm able to feel but in Linux which does not even mount hdd partitions or anything, the HDD seems to vibrate quite more than in windows thus heating itself up. Please tell me if there something I should do. Because before this I used Manjaro which didn't cause any problems.
My laptop is lenovo legion 5i
Specs:
i5 10300H
GTX 1650
256 SSD(Samsung)
1 TB HDD(Toshiba)
8GB RAM

d_fajardo · 2021-05-19 07:07:29

And I mounted partitions of HDD to some directories of my user home directory.

I have a feeling this is caused by your user session the drives being mounted in your home directories. It's probably your user session keeping the drives busy. This is pure guess however.
You can try creating mouthpoints in your system .i.e. /mnt/mountpoint and mounting those HDD there instead and see if you get better results. Then you can just create links of those points to your home directory.

grim-reaper · 2021-05-19 07:13:01

But I don't mount any hdd partitions anymore. The two hdd partitions are NTFS formatted and one of them have windows on them. Anyways I have removed all HDD partitions entries from /etc/fstab. So they are not automounting at boot.

grim-reaper · 2021-05-19 08:16:01

Should I consider installing Linux-zen kernel. Will that make any difference???

d_fajardo · 2021-05-19 08:49:43

Anyways I have removed all HDD partitions entries from /etc/fstab.

Are you saying the HDD still actively spins even if they are not mounted?

Should I consider installing Linux-zen kernel. Will that make any difference???

I'm not sure if it will make any difference.

grim-reaper · 2021-05-19 09:09:16

Yes exactly the HDD spins even though it's not mounted in Linux.
A blog said that linux-lts is better for multi-boot system. So I'm installing and giving it a try. Maybe it'll fix my problem.

d_fajardo · 2021-05-19 10:15:18

Yes exactly the HDD spins even though it's not mounted in Linux.

That is strange. It doesn't happen with my HDD EVEN if they it is mounted. Only when I access the filesystem does it trigger the spin. Let us know how it gets on with lts.

seth · 2021-05-19 12:28:27

1st: 3rd link in my signature. mandatory read.
2nd: Does "sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdX" power down the HDD (make sdX the HDD device, eg. "sda")
3rd: distance between HDD and SSD? Latter can heat up significantly, the HDD is perhaps just picking up the heat? Even at perma-access, 50°C is **very** hot for a HDD.

grim-reaper · 2021-05-19 14:13:33

So as I said before that I will try changing the kernel to see that makes any difference. To my surprise it did partially solve my problem. This is funny. So as long as I keep reading the HDD temperature using hddtemp, the temperature goes down to 37-39°C and stays there. I discovered this by accident when I was observing HDD temperature using the 'watch' command. And this only worked in the Linux-zen kernel and Linux-lts kernel. When I again booted in the linux-stable kernel, the hdd started heating up and the vibrations could be felt across the trackpad right to the opposite side of the laptop. So I followed this:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hddtemp#Monitors
and added it to conky. And enabled conky at startup. I use i3WM so had to override i3WM control of conky so that it would start on desktop/background and not in a window.
I will remove linux-stable and use Linux-zen and keep Linux-lts as a fail-safe.

@seth I will disable fast boot up in windows so as to stay on the safe side.
If someone could explain why continuous reading of temperature worked or suggest a better way, that would be pretty great.
Thanks in advance guys.

Last edited by grim-reaper (2021-05-19 14:15:46)

seth · 2021-05-19 14:19:36

Check dmesg for errors, polling the disks controller might simply inhibit whatever else is going on there.

grim-reaper · 2021-05-19 16:37:30

@seth I did the dmesg you recommended and the results can be found at the following website:
https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/29QpCYM3j2/

These are the logs which I found related to my HDD when I went through the logs. But it doesn't seem like there's any error in them:

[ 0.837702] ata1: SATA link up 6.0 Gbps (SStatus 133 SControl 300)
[ 0.840637] ata1.00: ATA-10: TOSHIBA MQ04ABF100, JU0A2E, max UDMA/100
[ 0.840645] ata1.00: 1953525168 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 32), AA
[ 0.844581] ata1.00: configured for UDMA/100
[ 0.844788] scsi 0:0:0:0: Direct-Access ATA TOSHIBA MQ04ABF1 2E PQ: 0 ANSI: 5
[ 0.845172] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Drive-managed SMR disk
[ 0.845182] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1953525168 512-byte logical blocks: (1.00 TB/932 GiB)
[ 0.845185] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 4096-byte physical blocks
[ 0.845197] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off
[ 0.845200] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00
[ 0.845219] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA
[ 0.919686] sda: sda1 sda2 sda3
[ 0.925880] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Attached SCSI disk

Please do go through the logs as i'm really new at Arch and I might have missed something important.
Meanwhile, I'll boot into windows and turn off fast boot. And then see if there's any improvement.

seth wrote:

polling the disks controller might simply inhibit whatever else is going on there.

So will this continuous polling harm my HDD or is it stopping something in HDD which will sometime later damage it???

Last edited by grim-reaper (2021-05-19 20:26:51)

grim-reaper · 2021-05-19 20:25:06

Disabling fast boot and hibernate in windows didn't do anything. The continuous temperature monitoring seems to be the only workaround for now. Do suggest if you guys have a better alternative.

Last edited by grim-reaper (2021-05-19 20:25:38)

seth · 2021-05-19 20:30:40

What happens if you mount a partition on the drive?
Polling the controller won't do anything, but something™ is heating the disk up and constant head access will wear it down and heat will kill it rather fast - that's hardly a sustainable situation.

The dmesg is unspectacular
(for the future please use eg. ix.io - ubuntus pastebin service sucks and you need to register to download the file)

grim-reaper · 2021-05-20 08:08:10

seth wrote:

What happens if you mount a partition on the drive?

Nothing different, the results are same.

Seth wrote:

constant head access will wear it down

You mean accessing data. But Archwiki said it's fine to use hddtemp in conky.

Seth wrote:

The dmesg is unspectacular
(for the future please use eg. ix.io - ubuntus pastebin service sucks and you need to register to download the file)

Sorry. Will keep that in mind in the future. So you didn't find any problems in the logs??

seth · 2021-05-20 11:16:04

You mean accessing data. But Archwiki said it's fine to use hddtemp in conky.

Yes, as mentioned

seth wrote:

Polling the controller won't do anything

But

seth wrote:

something™ is heating the disk up

and that's not the temperature check for sure. The heat will be related to the "buzzing" and that "buzzing" is most likely the head reading the disk and that's not good.
You want to figure what's causing that and stop it - sideloading the controller to slow down the constant reading is not a viable solution nor workaround.

Anything here?

sudo lsof | grep sda

Also, did you try to

seth wrote:

2nd: Does "sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sdX" power down the HDD (make sdX the HDD device, eg. "sda"

?

Roken · 2021-05-20 17:35:13

Do you, by any slim chance, have a swap partition on the HD?

grim-reaper · 2021-05-20 19:51:15

[grim-reaper@archlinux ~]$ sudo lsof | grep sda
[sudo] password for grim-reaper: 
lsof: WARNING: can't stat() fuse.gvfsd-fuse file system /run/user/1000/gvfs
      Output information may be incomplete.
hddtemp    357                            root    3r      BLK                8,0       0t0        165 /dev/sda
gvfsd     5026                     grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so
gvfsd     5026 5027 gmain          grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so
gvfsd     5026 5028 gdbus          grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so
gvfsd-tra 6437                     grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so
gvfsd-tra 6437 6438 gmain          grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so
gvfsd-tra 6437 6439 gdbus          grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so
gvfsd-net 6986                     grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so
gvfsd-net 6986 6990 gmain          grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so
gvfsd-net 6986 6991 gdbus          grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so
gvfsd-net 6986 6995 dconf\x20      grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so
gvfsd-dns 6996                     grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so
gvfsd-dns 6996 6997 gmain          grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so
gvfsd-dns 6996 6998 gdbus          grim-reaper  mem       REG              259,3    169736    1053438 /usr/lib/gvfs/libgvfsdaemon.so

I did try the shutting down command.

sudo hdparm -Y /dev/sda

But the drive did not completely spin down.

Last edited by grim-reaper (2021-05-20 19:58:44)

grim-reaper · 2021-05-20 19:53:09

Roken wrote:

Do you, by any slim chance, have a swap partition on the HD?

No. I have one of 16 GB on SSD.

grim-reaper · 2021-05-20 20:02:25

 [grim-reaper@archlinux ~]$ lsblk -f
NAME        FSTYPE FSVER LABEL UUID                                 FSAVAIL FSUSE% MOUNTPOINT
sda                                                                                
├─sda1      ext4   1.0         15df80d9-b564-4086-a7ce-2a8035b349b8                
├─sda2      ntfs               D06AA8856AA86A44                                    
└─sda3      ntfs               208392F34D4BD8AC                                    
nvme0n1                                                                            
├─nvme0n1p1 vfat   FAT32       B48C-0862                             671.7M     4% /efi
├─nvme0n1p2 swap   1           21c6e6e2-3f98-4f52-873d-5eb73aed7b14                [SWAP]
└─nvme0n1p3 ext4   1.0         dd46f749-5453-47ff-9614-28f530b8ebed    184G    10% /

This is my partition scheme.
/dev/sda is HDD.
/dev/nvme0n1 is SSD.
/dev/sda2 has windows.

Last edited by grim-reaper (2021-05-20 20:04:21)

seth · 2021-05-20 20:07:24

But the drive did not completely spin down.

Stop hddtemp first.

grim-reaper · 2021-05-20 20:17:21

seth wrote:

Stop hddtemp first.

Did that and issued the hdparm command. If this does work, then is it okay to do this everytime. It won't harm my HDD??

Maybe instead of forcing drive into low power mode. I could do this:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hdparm … after_boot

Last edited by grim-reaper (2021-05-20 20:29:24)

Maniaxx · 2021-05-20 20:27:54

1) You could check/log/watch/analyze HDD accesses. I usually use one of these methods. In your case i would start with 'iotop' and 'audit'.

find / -mmin -10 2>/dev/null | grep -vE '(^/dev|^/proc|^/sys|^/run|^/tmp)'

inotifywait -r -m -e modify -e attrib -e close_write -e create -e delete -e delete_self --exclude /tmp/
inotifywait -r -m /home/user

lsof -n -p $(pidof app)
lsof -n -t file

iotop

sudo auditctl -w /tmp/myaudit.txt -p rwa
sudo auditctl -l
sudo auditctl -D (delete all)
sudo ausearch -f /tmp/myaudit.txt -i

2) There are some weird bugs in several (old GTK?) dconf based tools that seem to bypass hdd cache and rattle HDDs a alot. I still have some files moved into tmpfs for such cases like '~/.config/dconf'. For me, its 'meld' that hammers a lot. On every mouse over or scrolling the HDD was rattling. You could make rhythms/music with it. Here is a bug report. Not sure if related to your problem.

3) Traditional HDDs might work better on BFQ scheduler.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/improv … _scheduler

4) Check if hardware caches are enabled (if available):
sudo hdparm -I /dev/sda

5) Look up SMART values.

Just some ideas...

Last edited by Maniaxx (2021-05-20 21:03:40)

seth · 2021-05-20 20:48:37

hdparm wrote:

-y Put drive in standby mode
-Y Put drive to sleep

Just idling the disk won't harm it, no.
You can try whether standby or sleep works (better) but: is possibly hddtemp what keeps the HDD busy?

grim-reaper · 2021-05-20 21:32:55

Hey it worked, I'm using my laptop for about an hour now and it's HDD is not producing any heat. When I put my ears to the laptop surface, I can hear HDD purring but I don't feel it on the surface or any heat.
So I'm going to follow the Archwiki trick for putting HDD to sleep after boot:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hdparm … after_boot

But I want to ask one thing. Why is the command the above link has two options which basically does the same thing, -S 120 and -y. Wouldn't it work with just -S 120(putting device to low power mode after 10 minutes).

And

Maniaxx wrote:

Just some ideas...

maybe I'll try your solution someday but right now I'm so behind in my college work. I gotta get up on that. But thanks for all your solutions. HDD is for windows and I don't really care if it's sleeping while Linux boot.

seth wrote:

but: is possibly hddtemp what keeps the HDD busy?

it was heating before hddtemp was installed. And I enabled hddtemp.service yesterday so probably no.

Last edited by grim-reaper (2021-05-20 21:33:41)

seth · 2021-05-20 21:36:58

Wouldn't it work with just -S 120(putting device to low power mode after 10 minutes).

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Hdparm … _to_sleep_directly_after_boot
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/directly

When you put the drive to sleep, does running hddtemp on it wake it and does that make it spin and heat up again?

Arch Linux

#1 2021-05-19 06:45:48

HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#2 2021-05-19 07:07:29

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#3 2021-05-19 07:13:01

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#4 2021-05-19 08:16:01

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#5 2021-05-19 08:49:43

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#6 2021-05-19 09:09:16

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#7 2021-05-19 10:15:18

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#8 2021-05-19 12:28:27

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#9 2021-05-19 14:13:33

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#10 2021-05-19 14:19:36

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#11 2021-05-19 16:37:30

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#12 2021-05-19 20:25:06

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#13 2021-05-19 20:30:40

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#14 2021-05-20 08:08:10

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#15 2021-05-20 11:16:04

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#16 2021-05-20 17:35:13

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#17 2021-05-20 19:51:15

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#18 2021-05-20 19:53:09

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#19 2021-05-20 20:02:25

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#20 2021-05-20 20:07:24

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#21 2021-05-20 20:17:21

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#22 2021-05-20 20:27:54

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#23 2021-05-20 20:48:37

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#24 2021-05-20 21:32:55

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

#25 2021-05-20 21:36:58

Re: HDD buzzing while using Archlinux (installed in SSD)

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