Michael - Re: iotop - or, checking what is accessing a drive

[deb <deb@rangingthoughts.org>]

On 3/22/19 12:24 PM, Michael Stone wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 11:23:29AM -0400, deb wrote:
> > a.  Has anyone used iotop? thoughts?
> >
> > (I did -- it's CLI-based. I was underwhelmed. Hard-ish to use; can't 
> > easily
> > pinpoint processes accessing the drives)
>
> Well, it's hard to say what would work better if you can't explain 
> what the problem is with iotop. By default it sorts by io %, which 
> isn't necessarily the best view. Left and right arrows highlight and 
> sort by other columns, and it may be more useful to look at reads and 
> writes individually.
>
> Depending on what's on the disk, it might be more useful to just use 
> lsof to see what files are open and try to understand what those might 
> be doing.

Thank you Michael.

I'll build up a list of these recommendations for here.


I'm looking at hdparm -C too.

No --help on that one.

man hdparm

-C  Check  the  current  IDE power mode status, which will always be
              one  of  unknown  (drive  does  not   support this   
command),
              active/idle  (normal  operation), standby (low power 
mode, drive
              has spun down), or sleeping (lowest power mode, drive  
is  com‐
              pletely  shut down).  The -S, -y, -Y, and -Z options can 
be used
              to manipulate the IDE power modes.

Thank you