Disk drive ‘tickling’

English Hardware
1

I have 3 HDD’s in my machine.
/dev/sda Leap 15.4. PATA
/dev/sdb Windows Sata
/dev/sdc Leap 15.4 SATA

I know the Info Center indicates there are disk problems, but running my disk analysis USB key passes every test.

I know what each disk sounds like when being accessed.
Regardless which Leap disk I am using, something is accessing the Windows drive.

I suspect it is the S.M.A.R.T deamon, but that is just a guess.
Top does not have a line for S.M.A.R.T at the times disks are being accessed.

Can I disable smartctl or change it to only access drives once a week?
I would prefer disable, but have seen that is not a good thing to do.

2

I went into YaST and set ‘smartd’ to manually start instead of ‘on boot’.
Hopefully that will quiet the routine down.
Time will tell.

3

From this article, install fatrace and run:

> sudo fatrace /dev/<device>

There are other tools but this is I think the easiest tool for the job.

4

i will look into fatrace again. Read several things about it was a bit confusing.

thanks fir the response!

5

After setting both Leap installs to not run ‘smartd’ at boot it seems to settle the access to the windows drive some.

The problem is that when I start Win7 from Grub2, it is a long drawn out process of Windows going through a chkdsk, or worse, needing to ‘fix’ problems.

That didn’t happen until something started accessing that drive, and the accesses were constant. Nearly every every 10-20 seconds.

May be time for a new machine….

6

The sound is not from data access. This are signs that your harddisk is dying.

7

… and what does smartctl actually show for the condition of those drives - replace /dev/sda as appropriate

sudo /usr/sbin/smartctl -data -A /dev/sda

or for full details

sudo /usr/sbin/smartctl --all /dev/sda
8

Clicking of the head (moving constantly back to home position because of hardware failure) don’t show up in smartctl.

9

If that is what the problem is; and whilst it may not show directly, I would expect to see an excessive number of seek errors.

10

Yep, Windows drive going bad. Would work well some days(few), but most it was a problem.
Thanks for all your responses and advice!

I found the original 80GB HDD that was in the machine, put it in & installed Win7 on it.

I only need Windows for iTunes, until someone finds a always to sync to iPod Touch. When that happens Windows is gone!!

I am looking at cost of SDD’s (or a new machine).
Limited income, so cost is a big factor.

Thanks again for the helpful responses.