My linux box is constantly accessing the hard drive. The noise is driving me insane. I had to turn it off.

Right now I can't even access it via putty.(SSH) There's just too much 'lag.' I can't access any files. I try to open the network point and it just stalls. I have no idea what to do.

I tried looking in top, but there's nothing unusual.

I know I said I can't access it now. I can't, but I could before. It's like sometimes on, sometimes off. Very erratic.

If someone could tell me how to troubleshoot this issue please tell me or point me in the right direction.

Thanks.

First check for errors being logged to any of the /var/log/* files.
Second is what have you changed or upgraded recently?

Another suggestion, you can check what process uses the hard disk with iotop http://slackbuilds.org/repository/14.1/system/iotop/

Are you sure nepomuk or anokondi aren't running?
Have you ruled out impending hardware failure?

Sounds like it might be swapping. Try checking how much RAM is free/used.

Thanks for the replies.

Today it seems to be behaving itself much better. Although access to my samba shares is still quite sluggish and effectively unusable.

In syslog there's a lot of complaining about not being able to connect to my printer. I never use my slackbox to print, so, I never configured it to print.

I haven't upgraded anything. This is a (relatively) new install.

iotop doesn't show anything being used right now. If that changes I'll post an update.

I don't see anokandi or nepomuk running.

It could be that my hard drives are failing. But the smart test said they were OK.

I have 1 GB of RAM, so I don't think that memory space is an issue. Top says that it isn't using swap. But now that my head is a little cooler today (as opposed to last night), I'm looking at top and it says 440MB of ram space used when it said 250MBs a moment ago. So, it very well could be some sort of memory leak, maybe? The highest memory usage smbd, console-kit-dae and polkitd at 0.7%.

No... wait... Isn't there some cron task that's scheduled to run late night? I remember this from a long time ago, I just don't remember. I'm looking in /etc/cron.daily but the scripts there are hard to read since I'm not very proficient when it comes to coding. But then, why would this cause my samba shares to be sluggish?

slocate's updatedb runs daily at nights, I suppose. But I never saw it slow down the system to such an extent.

Yea, you were right on the money. I had done the smart test in windows, big mistake! (To be fair, it could have been that the problem is intermittent as many of these things are.) smartctl seems to be much better at detecting faults. So, I replaced the bad drive and am now re-syncing the array.

Thanks to all who responded.