Hello folks:
Situation:
Plenty of portable NTFS drives, occasionally hooked to debian.
The drive's light stays on [indicating use] even when dismounted (but
still connected via USB).
I'd like to try and find out what's using the drive.
I don't like the idea of just yanking the cable...
I can not afford to trash data.
I found iotop below (a top for processes creating I/O).
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)
b. Can anyone recommend a different tool?
Thanks!
My info was found here:
https://www.hecticgeek.com/2015/01/ext4-external-hard-disk-busy-at-idle-fix/
"My Newly Formatted (‘Ext4’) External Hard Disk is Busy, Even at Idle
[Fix]
January 8, 2015
<https://www.hecticgeek.com/2015/01/ext4-external-hard-disk-busy-at-idle-fix/>
by Gayan <https://www.hecticgeek.com/author/gayan/>
I recently purchased a Western Digital My Passport Ultra (1TB, USB 3.0)
external hard disk as I was running out of space to save my
files. Although I dual-boot a GNU/Linux
<https://www.hecticgeek.com/gnu-linux/> distribution (which is the
awesome Fedora 21
<https://www.hecticgeek.com/2014/12/fedora-21-review/> nowadays) with
Windows 8.1, and almost all of my friends rely on the Windows operating
system, I took the decision to format it into ‘Ext4’ anyway, despite
having the obvious drawback to which I am bound (that would be sharing
data of course ).
To be honest, I never had used a native GNU/Linux file system on a large
USB hard disk before, thus, after creating an ‘Ext4’ file system on the
1TB USB drive, I made an interesting (and irritating) observation. What
happened was that, after formatting the drive into ‘Ext4’, whenever I
mounted the USB disk, even when I was not using it, the LED starts to
indicate (by blinking) a mild disk activity.
I ignored it the first time, but every time I mounted the drive, it
happened again and again. And on all these instances the LED kept
blinking non-stop for minutes and the only way stop it was to detach the
USB disk from the computer. So in an attempt to isolate its cause, I
used the ‘iotop
<https://www.hecticgeek.com/2012/03/iotop-disk-io-monitor-ubuntu-linux/>‘
utility (it’s a tool that sorts & lists processes by their disk I/O
consumption). And as soon as I opened it, ‘iotop’ listed a process
called ‘ext4lazyinit’ that was consuming a mild I/O bandwidth (about
11-13 Mb/s) out of my WD USB hard disk."
