Re: [CentOS] Constant disk activity

On 4/13/05 8:01 AM, first last wrote:

I am running centos on a laptop and the HD keeps on making noises every so often, even when I go to runlevel 1 and stop everything that could be doing so (hotplug, smartd, cron, anacron, atd, syslogd...).

Is there any way of finding out what is accessing the disk? Not only it shortens battery life, it is annoying while working in a quiet room.

My hunch is that it's kjournald. Do you have ext3 filesystems on that machine?

You can test it:

echo 1 > /proc/sys/vm/block_dump # wait for disk access to occur dmesg

Once you're done, poke 0 into the block_dump setting to stop your kernel log from overflowing. :-)