Hello everyone

I am running Mint 19.3 Cinnamon version 4.4.8. Kernal4.15.0-76-generic

My hard drives run full speed for about 5 minutes every time I start my computer. its like something is indexing my hard drives. There are three in my system. 4gig-mint Linux, 2gig-windooze10, 4gig-backup.

I don't know that I have installed anything that would cause them to run this way. They slow down what I consider normal operation after about 5 minutes.

Is there some service or weird program that would cause this?

I have had one 4gig drive fail after only 3 years. After replacing it and reinstalling mint 19, it does the same running full speed for 5 minutes.

Don't the use win10 often enough to notice if it does it on that drive.

Thanks in advance for your advice

Vanessa

you need to check which process[es] are running that time.

Hi pan64

Thanks for responding so quickly!

I installed atop and htop. I will run them at boot to see what is causing the hard drives to run full speed.
When I ran them now, I didn't see anything that looked unusual, so what ever is causing it either terminated or is sleeping.

Is there anything in particular you think I should look for?

Thanks
Vanessa

Use iotop if you want to check disk activity, in more generic tools sort by i/o if they support it. But yes, some disk activity after booting is normal - upgrade checks, disk indexing, late anacron jobs, etc.

also try (and show us)

I am unfamiliar with the term "hard drives run full speed for about 5 minutes".
Hard drives are either powered on and running or powered off/sleeping. Every system I have used spins up the drives when the system is booted and for most drives they remain spinning until the system is powered off.

Please provide more information to explain the use of the term above.

Maybe you are referring to fan speed on a laptop, which can be very loud during boot then settles down after the heavy cpu load of booting stabilizes as the system reaches normal operation. Theoretically the same can be seen with fan speeds on PCs with marginally sufficient cooling and the thermal stresses of booting the system.

Hey guys

pan64, lvm, ondoho, thanks for your help and direction. I was able to solve the issue by turning off the auto-update and auto-upgrade services using a sudo command

computersavvy, thanks for replying, I meant that my hard drives were constantly being written to for the first 5 minutes after boot.

thanks again for your help guys

Vanessa
XOXOXO

Good.
Just don't forget to regularly update/-grade your machine.