[Techtalk] periodic loud hard drive noise

Carla Schroder carla at bratgrrl.com
Thu Jan 14 23:37:29 UTC 2010


On Thursday 14 January 2010 02:59:32 pm Kathryn Hogg wrote:
> Carla Schroder wrote:
> > hey all,
> >
> > anyone have any clues what would cause a hard drive to suddenly go nuts?
> > This
> > happens 4-5 times per day that I know of, sometimes during idle times,
> > sometimes not. For about half a minute it works at top speed, making the
> > classic hard drive working-hard-grinding noise. Then it stops. top
> > doesn't show any crazy processes. There are two drives, so I don't even
> > know which one it is.
>
> can you run iotop whilst its busy?

I will surely do that, hadn't thought of it. I hope it's the poky old 20G IDE 
drive, it just sits there with win2k on it and never gets used. If I can't 
figure something out with kewl linux commands, I'll disconnect it, then I'll 
know which drive is doing it. smartctl says the other drive, a newer SATA 
disk, is all healthy.

Carla

-- 
======================
check out my books!
Linux Cookbook
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596006402/
Linux Networking Cookbook
http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596102487/
======================


More information about the Techtalk mailing list