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memmott avatar Ubuntu

Very high nonstop write activity in new USB disk

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memmott

I've installed a PCIe card to get USB 3 support, and have connected a 16TB SATA disk, which I've formatted in XFS. Initially I had very good read/write performance, but after a couple hours the performance has slowed down tremendously. Looking at atop I see that the disk is 100% busy with nonstop writes and has a latency of 6ms.

Running iotop, the only thing writing to this disk seems to be a kworker event, over and over:

$ sudo iotop -b -o -t | grep -i kworker
11:40:17   60451 be/4 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.32 % [kworker/u196:0-events_freezable_power_]
11:40:19   60451 be/4 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.32 % [kworker/u196:0-events_freezable_power_]
11:40:21   60451 be/4 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.32 % [kworker/u196:0-events_freezable_power_]
11:40:23   60451 be/4 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.32 % [kworker/u196:0-events_freezable_power_]
11:40:25   60451 be/4 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.30 % [kworker/u196:0-events_freezable_power_]
11:40:27   60451 be/4 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.52 % [kworker/u196:0-events_freezable_power_]
11:40:27   60765 be/4 root        0.00 B/s    0.00 B/s  0.00 %  0.05 % [kworker/u193:1-flush-8:0]

I haven't been able to figure out how to stop this. One theory I have is that it's some sort of power management, but I can't figure out how to disable power management on modern versions of Ubuntu. How can I figure out what is thrashing my disk?

  • Ubuntu 21.04
  • Linux pam 5.11.0-31-generic #33-Ubuntu SMP Wed Aug 11 13:19:04 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
  • Dell Poweredge R820 quad CPU with 1TB RAM
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