How can I stop constant HD journaling?

NickN

3/25/24, 4:51 PM

I'm new here, but this issue is already driving me nuts.

New PC with Windows 10 Pro pre-installed on 500Gb SSD, with 2Tb Seagate Barcudda internal HDD, both NTFS. Ryzen 5, 16Gb RAM.

I used Windows Disk Management to re-size both drives, with 50Gb put aside on the SSD and 500Gb on the HDD.

Used a bootable USB to install Xubuntu 22.04: OS installed in the 50Gb partition on the SSD, formatted EXT4, mount point /. Assigned the 500Gb HDD partition to /home and Ext4.

Grub enables access to both Windows and Xubuntu as expected.

Problem: running Xubuntu, the HDD is never quite and is subject to constant write operations which result in a near-continuous gurgling noise - Windows disk noise is confined to read and write noises only and is silent most of the time. The excessive noise in Xubuntu was the case from the first running of the newly-installed OS when /home had no data on it. Adding data/files has had no effect one way or the other on the constant noises.

My basic investigation and Googling is that the Xubuntu HDD noise is constant journaling, and Iotop shows jbd2/sda3-8 as the only disk activity when the system is idle. I understand the rationale behind journaling, but why is it noticeably only on this new computer? Previously I have run dual-boot setups with only mechanical HDDs on drives no larger than 1Tb, and they never produced this amount of noise. Frankly, I may have to work on Windows rather than have this incessant noise. Also, the constant accessing of the drive is surely going to reduce its lifespan. Can anyone help?

Will re-installing or formatting the /home partition to another file format be the only solution? If so, what file system should/would be best?

1 + 3

xubuntu

dual-boot

hard-drive

noise

22.04

David

3/25/24, 5:16 PM

Have you looked at the contents of the log files you think are being created?

guiverc

3/25/24, 10:08 PM

The file-system you select to use dictates what *journaling* is done, you used *ext4* which is a journaling file-system by design, so why did you opt to use it? Xubuntu is not limited to ext3/4. You could re-install & use a non-journaling file-system, as your choice of file-system will dictate how data gets stored there.

NickN

3/26/24, 4:35 PM

To guiverc, point taken. By way if explanation, I am opting for ext4, one, because it's never given me trouble before, and, two, I'm being slightly lazy and following the installer's default which is to use ext4 (and making the assumption that Ubuntu/Xubuntu would not default to a suspect file system).

Score:1

Ubuntu

Nmath

3/25/24, 8:35 PM

If the read/write noise of your HDD is intolerable, you need to install all of Ubuntu to the SSD, including /home.

/home contains hidden configuration files for almost all of your software. In general, these files will need to be accessed when software is launched and also periodically when software is running.

For this reason, the system will need to read or write to /home frequently. If you keep these files on a loud mechanical hard drive, you will have to deal with the noise when those files need to be accessed.

You don't need to store your large or static files in your /home folder. You can create a separate partition on your HDD for files that don't need to be frequently accessed.

SSDs don't have moving parts and should be silent. Another benefit is that they also vastly outperform HDDs in "random reads". The speed difference is particularly noticable when booting or launching software when the system will need to simultaneously read a lot of files at once, including configurations under /home. For better performance and quieter use, make sure Ubuntu is installed to the SSD and not the HDD.

+ 1

NickN

3/26/24, 4:43 PM

Thanks, Nmath. Yes, turning on hidden files illustrates your point very well. But without delving into log files (David) my impression is that Firefox is the worst culprit in the disk noise. I think I will leave it for a short time and explore working with large files (GIS and its associated hefty TIFF files is a significant aspect of my work) and see how it goes. If that's too annoying, I have room to delete the current / root partition, take some more of the Windows OS partition and set up both / root and /home on the SSD, while keeping the HDD as (probably entirely) NTFS for data storage.

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