Previously I wanted to know the differences between drive formats and which would work best with my system as I believed it to be a file access inefficiency. History here: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...83#post6367983

The problem I was trying to solve: Whenever an external drive is plugged into a USB port, operations on all USB ports, grind to a halt, Internet connections lag, as well the AV lags and at times and audio stutterers. I've found the problem to be more pronounced on mechanical drives as opposed to, SSD devices.

The computer is: Dell Inspiron 24-5490.Link to the .pdf manual, https://dl.dell.com/topicspdf/inspir...uide_en-us.pdf.

Ports are on pg. 19

Thank you,

fusionstate.

Are you pulling the usb bus low with a drive that needs external power? Are you reading/writing to it?

The only reason for a machine to slow down while a usb drive is plugged in should be, you are copying to it at 140MBps, or from. That will slow everything else down. Anything else that needs bits from the hard drive will slow, because it is sharing the bus with that external drive.

Are you saying that the machine slows down with it plugged in with nothing reading/writing to it?

When this slow down happens. What does top/htop say is using the cpu or the ram?

1 members found this post helpful.

An HDD that is connected by USB to a PC of any kind almost always requires an external power source before connecting it. Failing that it will pull down the voltage on the USB bus and cause issues. SSDs and M.2 drives usually do not have that problem unless that particular usb controller is overloaded.

You have not stated if you have the external power source, but connecting it to the laptop with those symptoms implies a possible power issue on USB.

Most usb2 ports are limited to ~.5 Amp current (2.5 W) and most usb3 ports are limited to ~1 Amp current (5 W). Exceeding those ratings will likely draw down the voltage needed for other devices on the 5 V bus on the motherboard

This is a desktop all in one model.

What version of Mint are you running? An older version might not fully support the version 3.1 USB ports.

What is the model number of your Seagate drive? Is it a USB 2 or 3 device?

Have you tried all ports? One port is USB 2 and the rest are 3.

Have you looked at the output of the desmg command to look for possible errors are warnings for the drive?

How old is the drive? SMART supports many USB drives and if it is recognized might show possible problems.

How much memory is installed? I believe it defaults to 4 GB but if you are running memory intensive operations more RAM might help.

When the drive is idle, response time of the mouse and system, still lags. I presently use a USB mouse.

The drive is plugged into USB port compatible with external power for drives, and 5 Gb transfer rates.

I've got to work on other things for a bit. I'll be back.

fusionstate.

Adding a note here that the HDD is a 3.5 inch disk.

2.5 inch disks can be powered on by USB.

Mint ver. 20.2.

I've tried all ports, and presently running on the 3.1, see system report info below.

desmg command? I don't know how to use it. I'll try typing desmg help and see what comes up.

Drive is from 2020.

I just found Seagate drive tools and downloaded the utility for Linux. I'll try to get that installed, although looks like I'll have to read the manual a bit first as the tools program has .run extension. Never saw that before.

12 Gigs RAM.

I also just noticed the port with power is 3.1. The USB drive supports 3.0.

Now the drive won't mount.

I may try a reboot. I tried to access the drive with Disks, it shows up, I can power it off, but I can't mount or format it.

Thanks for the assistance,

fusionstate.


System: Kernel: 5.4.0-121-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 9.4.0
Desktop: Cinnamon 5.0.7 wm: muffin dm: LightDM Distro: Linux Mint 20.2 Uma
base: Ubuntu 20.04 focal
Machine: Type: Desktop System: Dell product: Inspiron 5490 AIO v: N/A serial: <filter> Chassis:
type: 13 serial: <filter>
Mobo: Dell model: 0NYCKR v: A00 serial: <filter> UEFI: Dell v: 1.8.0 date: 12/09/2020
CPU: Topology: Quad Core model: Intel Core i5-10210U bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Kaby Lake
rev: C L2 cache: 6144 KiB
flags: avx avx2 lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 ssse3 vmx bogomips: 33599
Speed: 3900 MHz min/max: 400/4200 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 3900 2: 4083 3: 3903
4: 3900 5: 3900 6: 3901 7: 4082 8: 3900
Graphics: Device-1: Intel UHD Graphics vendor: Dell driver: i915 v: kernel bus ID: 00:02.0
chip ID: 8086:9b41
Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.13 driver: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa
resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz
OpenGL: renderer: Mesa Intel UHD Graphics (CML GT2) v: 4.6 Mesa 21.2.6
direct render: Yes
Audio: Device-1: Intel vendor: Dell driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel bus ID: 00:1f.3
chip ID: 8086:02c8
Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.4.0-121-generic
Network: Device-1: Intel Wireless-AC 9462 driver: iwlwifi v: kernel port: 4000 bus ID: 00:14.3
chip ID: 8086:02f0
IF: wlo1 state: up mac: <filter>
Device-2: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet vendor: Dell
driver: r8169 v: kernel port: 3000 bus ID: 01:00.0 chip ID: 10ec:8168
IF: enp1s0 state: down mac: <filter>
Drives: Local Storage: total: 1.14 TiB used: 532.99 GiB (45.6%)
ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Toshiba model: KBG40ZNS256G NVMe 256GB size: 238.47 GiB
speed: 31.6 Gb/s lanes: 4 serial: <filter>
ID-2: /dev/sda vendor: Seagate model: ST1000LM035-1RK172 size: 931.51 GiB
speed: 6.0 Gb/s serial: <filter>
Partition: ID-1: / size: 90.21 GiB used: 32.17 GiB (35.7%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda4
USB: Hub: 1-0:1 info: Full speed (or root) Hub ports: 12 rev: 2.0 chip ID: 1d6b:0002
Device-1: 1-1:6 info: Pixart Imaging Optical Mouse type: Mouse
driver: hid-generic,usbhid rev: 2.0 chip ID: 093a:2510
Device-2: 1-2:3 info: HP SK-2885 keyboard type: Keyboard driver: hid-generic,usbhid
rev: 1.1 chip ID: 03f0:0324
Device-3: 1-6:4 info: Melfas LGD AIT Touch Controller type: HID
driver: hid-generic,hid-multitouch,usbhid rev: 2.0 chip ID: 1fd2:6103
Device-4: 1-10:5 info: Intel type: Bluetooth driver: btusb rev: 2.0 chip ID: 8087:0aaa
Hub: 2-0:1 info: Full speed (or root) Hub ports: 6 rev: 3.1 chip ID: 1d6b:0003
Sensors: System Temperatures: cpu: 46.0 C mobo: N/A
Fan Speeds (RPM): cpu: 3351
Repos: No active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list
Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/brave-browser-release.list
1: deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/brave-browser-archive-keyring.gpg arch=amd64] https: //brave-browser-apt-release.s3.brave.com/ stable main
Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
1: deb http: //packages.linuxmint.com uma main upstream import backport
2: deb http: //archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal main restricted universe multiverse
3: deb http: //archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates main restricted universe multiverse
4: deb http: //archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-backports main restricted universe multiverse
5: deb http: //security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ focal-security main restricted universe multiverse
6: deb http: //archive.canonical.com/ubuntu/ focal partner
Info: Processes: 349 Uptime: 18d 15h 22m Memory: 11.53 GiB used: 6.55 GiB (56.8%)
Init: systemd v: 245 runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 9.4.0 alt: 9
Client: Unknown python3.8 client inxi: 3.0.38

I think you've got a typo - its 'dmesg' not 'desmg' and it will need to be run as root/sudo. If there's a whole bunch of USB errors that'd be a good place to start. Anecdotally: I've had consistently rotten luck with 'first party' (e.g. Seagate, WD, Toshiba, etc) external hard drives and their controllers (especially in linux), as they tend to use the cheapest/least documented stuff known to man to put them together.* If this is a 3.5" drive, my honest advice would be to shuck it and either put it inside the PC on a SATA port (if possible), or get a generic external enclosure or dock (e.g. Vantec, Orico, OWC, Startech, Pluggable etc) for a few bucks and hook it up that way. If this is a power issue (which I'm somewhat skeptical of - a modern system shouldn't allow its 5V to be pulled out of spec and continue operating, and if the device is overdrawing current on a specific port it should just see the port reset, not impact other devices - note the use of words like 'should' here), you may also consider a powered USB hub, but I'd preference dumping the Seagate enclosure for something else before I'd buy anything to try and coax the Seagate enclosure to work. If this is a 2.5" drive you're probably not in a great position for 'fixing' it, because many of those have the USB bridge built right into the physical disk (so there's no SATA port to be had). I'd also add, since this is storage doing something wonky: make sure any important data on this disk is backed up, especially before you try anything for troubleshooting.

To my surprise, when I connected the drive again, after a reboot, it turned up as formatted in Ext4. I suspect, even though, I had quit the process, mid stream due to what appeared to be a hung state, it appears it continued the format in the background. I don't know. In any event, I then divided the drive into two partitions. Strange as I'm unable to now format the new partition, since it belongs to root, I'm stuck again trying to figure out how to give myself permission to do anything with the new partition.

I would have posted sooner, but the switch at the phone company went down for two days.

fusionstate.

Aahh. dmesg does work. And it produced 29 pages of information. I did notice some red highlight in there as I copied it to paste into Office.

Thanks. Aslo for the other information on the drives. I previously had a seagate drive that I ended up pitching as a result of very similar behavior that began after I formatted it.

fusionstate

You could not have partitioned that drive without using root privileges (either with sudo or su).

You must do the same to format a partition as a file system. Again use sudo or su to obtain the needed permissions.

You also need root permissions to mount the file system on a mount point after the formatting is complete.

So at this point I'll move, restart the thread under, how to Mint.

Thanks for all the help,

fusionstate.