Why is Xubuntu/Ubuntu 20.04 constantly writing to disk at a rate of 1G/day?

lisprogtor

6/13/23, 7:47 AM

I have my Xubuntu 20.04 installed on a 2T SSD. This computer was purchased in October 2020, and is just over a year old. It is lightly used. I do not run firefox/chrome browsers on it because browsers are notoriously known for writing megabytes to disk every 15 seconds.

To my surprise, my 2T SSD already has 353G data written already. This is about 1G/day for sitting idle and not doing anything.

$ date ; cat /sys/fs/ext4/sda2/lifetime_write_kbytes
Sat 12 Feb 2022 11:33:17 PM PST
353386235

$ date ; cat /sys/fs/ext4/sda2/lifetime_write_kbytes
Sat 12 Feb 2022 11:33:34 PM PST
353386331

$ date ; cat /sys/fs/ext4/sda2/lifetime_write_kbytes
Sat 12 Feb 2022 11:41:13 PM PST
353386999

According to the above information, my idle computer is writing at a rate of 0.5M/sec. What process is actually writing so much data and eating my SSD? I want to shut it down.

0 + 0

ssd

process

matigo

6/13/23, 8:37 AM

If you’re *very* concerned about the lifespan of your SSD, you may want to read up about how modern OSes and SSDs work together to ensure maximum lifespans. Your drive will have also shipped with some additional storage that is not seen by the OS until blocks of flash memory have gone bad, allowing you to have perhaps a decade or more of “normal” operations. If you want to see what’s using your NVMe at any given time, you may want to consider [installing `iotop`](http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man8/iotop.8.html), which will show what services and applications are using the storage.

Terrance

6/13/23, 2:41 PM

It was writing at 5.64KB/sec which is no where near 0.5MB/sec. Your first two readings are 17 seconds apart with 96KB between them.

Terrance

6/13/23, 5:51 PM

The second reading was even less writing. Your span was 7 minutes 39 seconds or 459 seconds with 668KB written which works to 1.45KB/sec. I very highly doubt that your system is sitting idle 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

lisprogtor

6/14/23, 5:12 AM

Thank you very much matigo and Terrance. It is idle except an ssh which I hardly ever login remotely.

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Why is Xubuntu/Ubuntu 20.04 constantly writing to disk at a rate of 1G/day?

TH: เหตุใด Xubuntu/Ubuntu 20.04 จึงเขียนลงดิสก์อย่างต่อเนื่องในอัตรา 1G/วัน

RO: De ce Xubuntu/Ubuntu 20.04 scrie constant pe disc la o rată de 1G/zi?

RU: Почему Xubuntu/Ubuntu 20.04 постоянно пишет на диск со скоростью 1G/день?

VI: Tại sao Xubfox/Ubuntu 20.04 liên tục ghi vào đĩa với tốc độ 1G/ngày?

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