Good morning .

Will do as you suggest. Just two things for clarity:

1. /dev/sda6 is /home
2. For what it is worth: prior to the start of "ticking" there is a short burst of major activity on the drive, I don't know what happens but I can hear it. Right after it is over ticking starts.

HTH. Till then...

This is trying to narrow down culprits.With /home on /dev/sda6, be sure to get that offline, as if /home is causing it, that narrows it hugely. If /home is the troublespot, you could refine the output with to include /home and drop all other crud.

I tend to agree with this.
aditionally. I hadn't twigged that / is also mounted on the same hard drive.
For some reason I had thought this was about mounted but otherwise unused drives making noise. If the drive is used then I would expect it to be spinning and ready.

That is a misunderstanding. / is on /dev/sdc2 on a SSD, while /home is on /dev/sda6 on a spinning disk. The latter is producing the noise (about once every 6 weeks). I want to know what causes it. I don't want writing processes to my SSD the amount of data and general purpose of which I don't understand.

@IsaacKuo & 273: I think the OP's complaint is not about continual accesses, but about noise coming from the drive as in it doing (intermittently) successive seeks, e.g. Track 1; Track 100,000; track 1; track 100,000; etc. The platter spins, and that's not stop/starting.

I'm trying to get a diff of running processes with it misbehaving vs running processes when good. Then we'll have a shortlist of suspects. Any improvements on my strategy to achieve that welcome

@JZL240I-U: Could you temporarily mount /home on one of your other drives? If you had something like
in /etc/fstab and took out /dev/sda6, that would remove it from the equation while the diagnostics were going on. There's no need to modify the original /home. If it cured the problem, it probably was a seek to / followed by a seek to /home; If it MOVED the problem, it's home related

Oh, I understand but I also think it's incredibly stupid to avoid putting /home on the SSD. The problem could be solved 100% in minutes, rather than trying fruitlessly for months (already!) to track it down when so many processes and applications write to /home. It would be extremely difficult to narrow down which one is the culprit.

Although I do know a very easy way to tell what stuff is being written to in /home/me/ on the fly:

Simply use rsync to make a backup copy of /home/me/ with:

Run this a second time, and you'll see whatever has been changed between them. You can use the --exclude option to exclude folders or files that are too big to fit in the destination.

If you find some stuff that you don't like being written to on your SSD, then just symlink it to somewhere on the hard drive instead.

Since I use rsync to backup /home a lot (especially for my RAMBOOT systems), I have a good idea what all changes from minute to minute typically. It just isn't very much stuff. It's no big deal to put it on an SSD or even a cheap USB drive.

The disk that has the noise we have chased for months now it appears has / & /home. Moving it purely for the duration of his diagnostics narrows that down, and (after months as you say) is a good thing for diagnostic purposes, would you agree? Let the OP worry about the ideal drive arrangement of his system at a later stage when we have this sorted.

Yes.

No. There is space on the same disk (sda), but then the problem might be disk-related, so...

For a disk mounted as /home, with files being written to or read from all the time during use I would expect to hear thje drive making fairly regular reads and writes from different portions of the disk. for a drive in use this sounds normal to me.

That depends on the amount of data in /home versus the size of the SSD -- which is wayyy to small. Thanks for the compliments all the while .

The rest of your ideas are just fine but for one problem: This "ticking" comes in irregular intervals of 6 - 8 weeks or so, so there will be a lot of innocuous changes. Or did you mean to start "rsyncing" twice only when the symptoms are there?

No, no, and no. As stated most recently in post #64 :
I just had an idea of how to achieve the new home in spite of the problems outlined above. Let me think on this, I'll be back.

One drawback of this scheme would be that we would have to wait (indefinitely) whether the symptoms recurr or not and never finding out what caused it in the first place.

It is definitely not normal. Prior to the "ticking" there is a burst of activity on the disk and the "ticking" itself is quite distinct from the normal use of the disk. I can hear it right now, it is really quiet and certainly no pendulum-steady accesses in spaces of less than 1 second occur.

You're welcome . I mean, I'd apologize but off the top of my head I can't think of a way to apologize which doesn't sound patronizing (You know, "Sorry not sorry" type apologies).

I've made my opinion of the problem and what I see as a simple solution clear and blunt already. Beyond that, I'd rather not be antagonistic.

You can do it only when the symptoms are there, but I'd also do it every once in a while because that will give you an idea of what sort of stuff is changing normally on a day to day basis.

Who knows? You might catch something odd changing from one day to the next, indicative of the problem process making noise during a time you're not at the computer (or didn't notice the noise at the time).

I've just re-read the thread to confirm I was, at first, responding to an "abnormal disk activity" thread.
Since you confirmed that's not the issue then, surely, it's just a hardware quirk or fault?
Computers make all kind of weird noises and most are fine but to check you could now start doing things like watching YouTube videos of failing hard drives (if there are some) and other faults to confirm all is OK with your system.

Okay, Isaac, the SSD is primed, I found enough (rather static) directories to exclude during rsync from the magnetic disk to the SSD. Now we wait .