Cli Checking Disk I/o

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I just built a CentOS7 system on a Zotac NANO PC.

I used a 320GB 2.5″ HD I had sitting around and installed with Standard Partitions on XFS.

The drive is spinning, nonstop.

How can I monitor if there is actually disk i/o to warrant this constant spinning.

So noatime for all partitions work with XFS?  I did some browsing and the claim is XFS uses realtime which is better? than noatime?

Perhaps it is just occasional writes to messages (at least 1 a minute)
that determines to keep on spinning.

But it is annoying.

8 thoughts on - Cli Checking Disk I/o

  • OK.  That is interesting.  I am assuming tps is transfers per sec?

    I would have to get a stop watch, but it seems to go a bit of time, and then a write.

    Is there something that would accumulate this and give me a summary over some period of time?  Of course it better NOT be doing its own IOs…

  • I like iostat -x 4 which will give a summary every four seconds of accumulated stats, but check the man page for all the options you can use. iotop (yum install iotop) may also be helpful as it shows disk usage per process like top does for CPU and memory.

    Peter

  • basically no i/o, but the drive is spinning like mad.  It could be the hardware as on boot I do get the warning it was never tested upstream…

    I added noatime to fstab and then a ‘mount -a’ but no difference in behavior.

  • I would check the NANO to see if its firmware has any settings or updates which cover this. Then check if the drive has firmware updates needed. Motherboard and drive firmware fixes have been the things I
    have found to fix most of the problems for drive ‘not powering down’
    problems. I think the last one I remember on IRC was a drive set came up in a mode saying ‘I am in fast access mode’ or something and so the motherboard kept it spinning up all the time to make sure it could write quickly.

  • Am 11.11.19 um 14:28 schrieb Stephen John Smoogen:

    Maybe

    $ hdparm -S

    helps? Take a look into

    $ man hdparm

  • It looks like -S 1

    sets standby at 5 sec idle.  I kind of doubt this will matter, but I am trying it.

  • after

    hdparm -S 1

    The drive is making a lot less sound.

    I will monitor it.  Also have to see if this is permanent or I have to put it in a startup cron task.

    Thanks