Disk heads won't park
Greetings,
One of my 4 SATA HDDs is constantly making "write noise", as if it was
under heavy load. However, the system is idle (and recently
installed).
I can't see any activity on iotop and this starts immediately when i
turn on the box. The HDD activiy LED doesn't blink on this activity.
All drives seem functional, smartctl -t short <device> only shows
errors for sdd, the oldest drive, but by the noise it makes when
running said test that's not the culprit and it doesn't even have
filesystems yet (it's one big LVM VG with no LVs). That leaves me with
2 new drives (sda and sdc) that are part of a RAID1 array where / is
an xfs in an LV; and sdb which has /boot (256MB ext2) and /stuff (50GB
ext4 which is 1% full, also in an LV).
I believe sdb may be the culprit. Also booting has become slow (from
about 3sec to over 10, stopping on loading linux, loading ramdisk,
mounting filesystems, etc). (Also GRUB delays on "error: unknown lvm
metadata header" for /dev/sdb1, but that's because /boot is not on LVM
- i've edited all 4 simlinks to it from /etc/lvm/lvm.conf but it still
looks at it; GRUB proceeds normally after that).
Short of unplugging the drives one by one, is there a way i can a)
discover/confirm which one is thrashing about? and b) make it stop?
I've seen hdparm -s is not recommended, and i'm not sure if whichever
drive it is it supports the required power management feature (they
all support "Power Management feature set", but other power-related
features vary).
Any pointers would be appreciated. This is a wheezy installed 3 days ago.
TIA,
Nuno
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