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Frequent IO to an idling data drive with 22.04. How to figure out what's reading it?

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I've ran 18.04 for years and used a script to spin down my data drive when it is not in use. It is a WD RED drive and has no spindown timer of its own. This worked well via using

/proc/diskstats

and checking columns 6, 8, 13 and 14 to see if disk is in use. If not, I'd send spindown command via

hdparm -Y

This setup worked great for years. I recently upgraded to 22.04 and field 6 increases by 4 about every 10 minutes, even though the drive is not in use and idle. This machine is on 24/7 and over the course of last month. Since 22.04 upgrade there has not been a single 10 minute segment when field 6 did not increase at least once every 10 minutes.

  1. Was there some change in 22.04 with perhaps some process that now queries/reads /dev/sd* every x minutes and maybe I can reconfigure it to behave like it did in 18.04? Or is this a bug?

  2. Maybe 22.04 has added some new way to check if drive is being used that I can use instead of using /proc/diskstats?

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