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

[deb <deb@rangingthoughts.org>]

On 3/22/19 4:25 PM, David Wright wrote:
> On Fri 22 Mar 2019 at 16:07:24 (-0400), Michael Stone wrote:
> > On Fri, Mar 22, 2019 at 03:00:23PM -0500, David Wright wrote:
> > > If you're really worried, first remount the partitions readonly, which
> > > will fail if they're in use. Then unmount them and disconnect.
> > Just unmount--that will fail if the partition is in use unless extra
> > options are added.
> Sorry, it hadn't occurred to me that the OP wasn't just doing that
> (because they had said they used "Safely Remove" in Windows).
> Nor had it occurred to me that one might need a bettery of tools
> like iotop, hdparm, iostat, pidstat, perf top, and the rest,
> rather than just unmounting. I thought they wanted a belt and braces
> method, a bit of redundancy.
>
> So it's just the usual Pose Problem A, Solve Problem B.
>
> Cheers,
> David.

To summarize, I had been unmounting (multiple times, NO errors)
as well as eject -ing.
Drives still have hard light on.
This is different behavior than on Windows, where the light goes off 
signaling it's ready to to be removed.
Same drives in both cases.


I am quite happy to have the battery of recommended tools to see what is 
accessing the drives BEFORE ever unmounting at all.

At least Linux has these tools.

It is often a sysinternals-level jaunt on Windows to figure out what's 
tying up a drive. Their default error messages are a joke.