[vox-tech] Hard drive access

[Bill Kendrick]

Melissa's laptop (a Thinkpad T20 running Debian Woody) has this habit of
doing disk access quite often.  (It's mostly noticable when it's quiet in
the house, like right now, so I decided to investigate :^) )

The 'symptom' (assuming this is even a problem, and not just normal Linux
behaviour) is to make a very short disk access sound ('click!'), and then
about 1/2 second later, a slightly longer disk access ('clililililick!').
Also, the second time is usually the only time I notice the hard drive access
LED light up above the keyboard.

I tried switching to single user mode and killing off as many processes I
could, to try and see if anyone was having 'issues' and constantly logging
to files somewhere.  (I'm not a /proc or strace guru, like Mike Simons,
and I haven't kidnapped him yet, so all I really checked was an
"ls -lrt" listing of /var/log, so far...)

The machine currently has an uptime of about 4 days (I wonder what's up with
that? maybe Melissa forgot to charge it one day ;^) ), and I don't see
anything particularly troublesome going on.  Other than normal
"apt-get upgrade"s, no configuration changes have occurred in a while.
Of course, perhaps it's been doing this all along, and we never noticed until
recently.

I guess my biggest concerns are:

  1. Hax0rs
  2. Dying hard drive

If it happens to be:

    3. Messed up driver / daemon / etc.
or  4. Normal Thinkpad / Linux activity

...then I'm not so worried, obviously. :^)


Thx in advance

-bill!