Riddling activity on encrypted and mounted partition
Hi,
i have encrypted my HDD's (*) data partition. Now the disk access LED is
blinking rapidly as soon as i mount it.
Is this normal ?
I did:
cryptsetup -v -y luksFormat --type luks2 /dev/sda2
cryptsetup open /dev/sda2 daten
dd if=/dev/zero bs=512 count=7679784591 status=progress of=/dev/mapper/daten
Some hours later i did:
mkfs -t ext4 /dev/mapper/daten
In /etc/fstab i wrote a line with the new filesystem's UUID:
UUID=... /daten ext4 defaults,noauto
Manual mounting
mount /daten
works fine, but also causes the disk activity. Unmounting ends it.
The activity seems real:
cat /sys/block/sda/sda2/stat ; sleep 10 ; cat /sys/block/sda/sda2/stat
yields
797 1174 64313 3626 45984161 7636044108 7724077703 78712595 0 22193356 78716222 0 0 0 0 0 0
797 1174 64313 3626 45984321 7636044111 7724237503 78713043 0 22193688 78716669 0 0 0 0 0 0
which according to
https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/block/stat.txt
shows activity with write fields:
write I/Os 160 ( 45984321 - 45984161)
write merges 3 (7636044111 - 7636044108)
write sectors 159800 (7724237503 - 7724077703)
write ticks 448 ( 78713043 - 78712595)
The disk was supposed to be idle in those 10 seconds. Its ext4 contains
only 6 directories and 1 data file. Not much stuff to play with.
The data partiton of my SSD, which holds the active system, shows much less
activity during 10 seconds:
write I/Os 7
write merges 1
write sectors 64
write ticks 117
The disk is still the replaced WD WD4003FRYZ, now in a 5.25" noise reduction
cage, which makes its periodic knocking sound unhearable unless i press my
ear at the computer's side.
The disk additionally holds a 64 GB swap partition. But swapoff /dev/sda1
does not influence the disk traffic on /dev/sda2. Only umount does.
Have nice day :)
Thomas
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