Hard Disk moving a lot

[Drowz0r]

Hello all

I'm on Ubuntu 11.10 with a pretty middle/high end machine.

I've found that my hard disk seems to move a lot. This is a lot more noticeable when I'm doing a lot of things at once. On windows I'd expect this to be fragmentation and after a defrag it would stop... though I understand Linux cannot become fragmented, so what is causing it? o.o

My file system is EXT4 if that helps?

Thanks all

[zombifier25]

It means your hard drive has a lot of stuffs being read/written to it. However, the cause is rather generic (there may be no problem at all)

[2F4U]

When you say it seems to happen more often when you do a lot of things in parallel it could be a swapping issue. How much RAM do you have in the machine? Do you notice a slowdown?

[Drowz0r]

Hello there

Thanks for the replies. Here is my spec:

OS: Ubuntu 11.10
RAM 3GiB
CPU Intel Quad Q6600 2.40GHz
512 MB RAM GeForce 8800 GT Nvidia

Doesn't appear to be a swapping thing :/

It seems to happen when doing a lot of stuff at once, being looking at multiple web pages or watching youtube videos or something. Not actually burning CDs or something.

When I did the same thing on Windows XP, the disk didn't move nearly as much.

[QIII]

Disks can (and do) become fragmented, despite the myth. Just not on the rampant wholesale level.

Is your disk moving more or making more noise?

[Drowz0r]

Disks can (and do) become fragmented, despite the myth. Just not on the rampant wholesale level.

Is your disk moving more or making more noise?

The level of the sound is the same as before, it's just more frequent. Comparable to an XP machine if I'd not defraged it for a year or something.

[QIII]

Could you install lm-sensors, run sensors-detect and then install a tool like gkrellm to actually look at disk activity objectively?

[Drowz0r]

Could you install lm-sensors, run sensors-detect and then install a tool like gkrellm to actually look at disk activity objectively?

I'll take a look around the software centre and stuff for it and let you know how I get on. Thanks!