Hello,
I have a brand new Toshiba 8TB HDD and I put it in a USB 3.0 dock, formatted it and everything went well.
Then, because of the plastic dock acting as a echo chamber, I noticed the drive clicking constantly, not like a broken klinking drive but like a normal head moving.
I removed it from the dock and put it in a eSATA/USB 3 Rosewill external case, using the eSATA port. I noticed the drive doesn't do it when it's not mounted so I started tracking down what might be writing to the drive.
The drive is sdh1
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[root@desktop1]# iotop -o -b -d 4
Total DISK READ : 0.00 B/s | Total DISK WRITE : 0.00 B/s
Actual DISK READ: 0.00 B/s | Actual DISK WRITE: 0.00 B/s
TID PRIO USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN IO COMMAND
Total DISK READ : 0.00 B/s | Total DISK WRITE : 74.09 K/s
Actual DISK READ: 0.00 B/s | Actual DISK WRITE: 6.76 M/s
TID PRIO USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN IO COMMAND
5527 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 7.99 % [ext4lazyinit]
1015 be/3 root 0.00 B/s 19.76 K/s 0.00 % 0.95 % [jbd2/nvme0n1p7-]
5520 be/3 root 0.00 B/s 1011.54 B/s 0.00 % 0.80 % [jbd2/sdh1-8] <-------------------- It's that drive.
6622 be/4 root 0.00 B/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 0.22 % [kworker/u16:2-flush-259:0]
First I used KSsysGuard to set up a HDD I/O monitor and I spotted the spiked pattern right off. There's about a 4MB/s write repeatedly, about twice per second. The drive is sdh1 [jbd2/sdh1-8] and after a lot of reading I read it may be related to ext4lazyinit.
It is one large ext4 partition and it doesn't do it if it's formatted as NTFS or ext3. It is possible there is a bad sector that other file systems are not trying to use, or maybe it's a bug. But it appears to be journal related. The dock and the external case are both rated for 8TB and I have tried multiple smaller partitions to try and force it to use different sectors for the journal etc.
It's a new drive and if it's defective I need to return it quickly, so I need to get it sorted out if it's a bug, user error or a bad drive.
I've been working on it for hours, and reading everything. I've installed a few drives and it shouldn't be this difficult, so I'm afraid it is defective.
If you've seen this problem before or have a clue, I'd sure appreciate some help.
Thank you.