Constant access to newly formatted external drive

[alexsec]

I formatted and encrypted an external USB 3.0 hard disk. I formatted the encrypted partition as ext4.

The moment I mounted it, the access light on the disk started blinking constantly, showing some kind of constant access.

I’m also looking at this post: Continuous write access to external hard drive

where the user seems to face an identical problem but no solution was given, desides the fact that they thought the kernel was actually checking the file system when it was first mounted.

Is this case? Does the kernel actually do that on openSUSE? Cause I haven’t seen this happen on other distributions so far.

Thank you.

[marel]

From the post that you linked the issue seems to be:

(…) the inode table will not be fully initialized by mke2fs. This speeds up filesystem initialization noticeably, but it requires the kernel to finish initializing the filesystem in the background when the filesystem is first mounted. (…)

So I would just wait, if the activity is gone after some hours, it was likely this.

[alexsec]

@marel

The activity has stopped. Luckily it was only a 320 Gb drive. If the drive needs to be used right after the format thought, this would cause a really big problem, especially if the drive is big.

Thank you.