Tracking HD activity

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Nov 13, 2007 at 10:35:36AM -0500, Giles Orr wrote:
> The hard drive light on my computer has been flashing about once a
> second for a week or more now, regardless of what's going on on the
> computer.  It does this even when I kill all user programs and close X
> entirely, so that eliminates a huge block of programs right there.  Is
> there a program similar to "top" for disk usage?  Any other
> suggestions on how to track down the culprit?  I suppose I could use
> "kill -9" on every process listed by "ps ax" until it stopped, but I'm
> trying to find a more elegant solution.  Thanks.
> 
> Partial system specs:
> Debian testing
> Linux glo 2.6.21-2-k7 #1 SMP Wed Jul 11 04:29:08 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux
> AMD 2700+, two HDs, two optical drives (all IDE)

Could be gnome or kde running some volume manager or mount deamon
polling the cd/dvd for inserted disks every second.  That would make the
light flash.  After all the light doesn't mean hard disk activity, but
rather disk controller activity.

--
Len Sorensen
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