Constant HDD read activity according only to System Monitor widget

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1

Hello! I’m baffled by what seems to be a contradiction in my System Monitor. This is a recurring ‘problem’ (if it’s actually a problem) but it seems to happen randomly and restarting it resolves it.

I have the Hard Disk Activity widget on my desktop, and on random days it starts showing nonstop read activity but I can’t figure out why. A few days ago it was a permanent ~150mib/s. It just started again today and its a constant ~90/mibs. If I open System Monitor itself, it shows no read activity, neither does running $ sudo iotop -o. There’s also no corresponding network usage.

Screenshot here.

For some context, I have two HDDs in a RAID 1 (DH Raid) and one SSD (fedora), plus two other SSDs for other operating systems. I went ahead and added a second widget with every read activity for every drive in my computer, and it seems to be coming from one of my two hard drives that are in the RAID 1. Not the RAID itself as mounted, and not from both hard drives in the RAID, but just one of the two.

Any idea how I can track down this phantom read activity, or confirm if this is just some bug in the widget? Am on Fedora KDE 44 with KDE Plasma 6.7.3.

2

hi, welcome.

do you have file indexing enabled?

settings > file search

3

I do, for filenames and contents for a few individual folders in my home directory (documents, music, etc. but those are all on my SSD). I also see that indexing is listed as idle/complete. Between posting and now the read activity has ceased, but the next time it happens I’ll check, and presumably it won’t be idle if it’s the cause?

4

it’s probably not the file indexing then.

you can setup a console window to watch your logs and see what it says the next time it starts up.

sudo dmesg -w

watch journalctl -S -5m

5

Already asked and answered here Constant HDD read activity according only to KDE System Monitor widget? - Fedora Discussion

It looks like its the mdraid doing it thing.