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This is problem I have repeatedly on several different computers and version of linux (mostly ubuntu, now 16.04 LTS). I clearly hear HDD is doing something, and also see the HDD LED shining. But I cannot see what process is responsible by any tools.

E.g. I tried those tool htop and iotop: How do I find out what processes are accessing the hard disk in a GNU/Linux-based system?

  • htop I have to run sudo htop otherwise it says I have no permission to see DISK I/O stats ( WHY ? why is disk I/O more protected than MEM or CPU ? ). Still with sudo it shows no disk activity at all, but I clearly hear disk working and LED shining (and computer lagging)
  • iotop always freeze and it start to react only after the disk activity ended
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Prokop Hapala
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  • I would think you would get a better answer here: http://unix.stackexchange.com/ – ctrl-alt-delor Jan 20 '17 at 09:42
  • Are you running `iotop` as root? It's my program of choice, and haven't had issues with it, so would be nice to know a bit of elaboration on how exactly it doesn't work for you :) – Iskar Jan 20 '17 at 10:09
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    By providing more information about how you use your machine and which specs it has you could also get some more guess at what to look out for. As an example, if the applications you're running use a lot of RAM it could be swapping. – Seth Jan 20 '17 at 10:21
  • I have to wait for the situation to reproduce the bahaviour (since I wan't to know what is that mysterious disk activity which happen from time to time) ... but what I remember `iotop` did not execute until the disk activity endend (several minutes) – Prokop Hapala Jan 20 '17 at 17:24
  • no, it was not disk swapping since I closed all apps but disk activity did not clam – Prokop Hapala Jan 20 '17 at 17:25
  • Pretty late, but for those of you that found this question because they have a similar question (and are as stupid as I am): in my case I thought it was an HDD I heard, but it was actually the CPU fan.... :D – Quido Jan 25 '22 at 21:03

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