My hard drive light is always on.

drfindley · 2006-10-17 21:01:25

I can't quite figure out what is the cause of this, but for hours my little hard drive light will be running (and I know it's accurate, I've my thinkpad for a while). I have recently upgraded my hard drive to a seagate, but I can't see how this should matter, as it behaves normal under windows.

I recently did a ext3 => reiser4 => ext3 change (reiser4 can be a pain to fix after a kernel / mkinitcpio upgrade) to my root disk, but even my secondary ext3 partition shows the same issues.

The light seems to be triggered by starting firefox. I have tried switching to init 1, and still the light was on.

Any ideas as to what the cause is? Is there a monitoring tool that I can use to see what's going on? I couldn't quite figure out how to use lsof to see the issue.

Adam

chrismortimore · 2006-10-21 22:04:44

gkrellm has a hard drive activity chart.

drfindley · 2006-10-24 23:55:38

wow, so starting gkrellm killed the light issue.

I'm kinda surprised

chrismortimore · 2006-10-25 07:08:22

That was unexpected... Oh well, least it's fixed.

drfindley · 2006-10-27 07:33:14

well it fixed it that once, but after a reboot, it still is having issues. My disk activity is showing 0 on gkrellm. It seems to be somehow directly tied to firefox (2 even).

I just don't seem to get it.

superstoned · 2006-10-28 10:14:26

probably firefox keeps some file open, and it (or the kernel) feels the obligation to check it every few nanoseconds to see if it changed ;-)

no idea how to find this out, however, and it's weird the problem doesn't go away in init 1. you didn't find anybody with the same problem? (i know i've never heard about it...)

drfindley · 2006-11-26 07:55:56

I found the problem. Write-caching doesn't mix w/ a journaling filesystem.

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Use_hdparm … Caching_-W

gentoo-wiki wrote:

Write-Caching has been reported to have problems with journaling filesystems (For instance ext3 and Reiser), and it is recommended that you don't enable it on such systems.

Arch Linux

#1 2006-10-17 21:01:25

My hard drive light is always on.

#2 2006-10-21 22:04:44

Re: My hard drive light is always on.

#3 2006-10-24 23:55:38

Re: My hard drive light is always on.

#4 2006-10-25 07:08:22

Re: My hard drive light is always on.

#5 2006-10-27 07:33:14

Re: My hard drive light is always on.

#6 2006-10-28 10:14:26

Re: My hard drive light is always on.

#7 2006-11-26 07:55:56

Re: My hard drive light is always on.

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