This story is a bit longer.
Weeks ago my 1.5 years old 2TB Hitachi hard disk showed signs of failure.
The System is a core i5 2500 desktop with intel onboard graphics.
I purchased a Seagate Enterprise hard disk of exactly the same size (2TB) to replace the old hard disk,
and managed to copy the contents 1:1 using dd.
Win7 which I wanted to keep (triple boot) worked fine after that from the new hard disk without complaining in any way ;)
I made a fresh install of openSUSE 13.1 on one of the 2 partitions earmarked for / (root partitions) of openSUSE,
and a /home partition, both formated with ReiserFS for that install.
Then first the problem occurred that the system did freeze during copies of the large number of files to and from external hard disks.
That problem was solved !
See thread
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthre...-copying-files
Later on I copied the contents of my old /home to the new one.
Now, after using it for a few minutes, the system again showed considerable lag,
making it almost unusable:
sometimes it e.g. took 2 minutes or more until the open/save file dialogue appeared,
after saying 'save page as' in Firefox.
Or Kwrite (yes, this simple app) took 3-4 minutes to load a short text file!
I thought that choosing ReiserFS may not have been a good idea.
So I made a second install of openSUSE 13.1 64bit with all updates included
on another / partition formatted ext3 (again triple boot, like on the old hard disk),
choosing /home as the original (or dd'ed) ext3 partition,
from which I deleted all hidden folders and files (the ones whose names start with a period '.')
before the install.
No improvement.
Just today one of my kids wanted to have a look at older private photos on a NTFS partition ("drive" D: ) - due to the lag that was almost impossible.
The disk light notoriously flashed at a low rate, and the noise of the hard disk never stopped.
A second, older PC (pentium dual core, smaller hard disk, less RAM, intel onboard graphics as well),
which kept me online and which I used for daily tasks,
which had the same openSUSE 13.1 64bit on it - installed from the same DVD -
and which did get the same online updates, didn't show these symptoms.
OK, that one didn't get a copy of my old /home - due to the lack of space on it's hard disk.
Now inspired by the posting https://forums.opensuse.org/showthre...84#post2647284
by Carlos, and because I began to run out of ideas,
about 2 hours ago I installed 'iotop' and did run it as root.
I was stunned, and still am: no more lag since then.
No more disk light flickering all the time.
I'm not paranoid,
but to me that looks a bit like a worm or a virus that tries to evade being detected.
Or could a call to 'iotop' from the terminal as root have similar effects for other reasons?
Still I didn't yet reboot, in order to see if the behaviour would be the same as before the call to 'iotop' then.
Mike
Weeks ago my 1.5 years old 2TB Hitachi hard disk showed signs of failure.
The System is a core i5 2500 desktop with intel onboard graphics.
I purchased a Seagate Enterprise hard disk of exactly the same size (2TB) to replace the old hard disk,
and managed to copy the contents 1:1 using dd.
Win7 which I wanted to keep (triple boot) worked fine after that from the new hard disk without complaining in any way ;)
I made a fresh install of openSUSE 13.1 on one of the 2 partitions earmarked for / (root partitions) of openSUSE,
and a /home partition, both formated with ReiserFS for that install.
Then first the problem occurred that the system did freeze during copies of the large number of files to and from external hard disks.
That problem was solved !
See thread
https://forums.opensuse.org/showthre...-copying-files
Later on I copied the contents of my old /home to the new one.
Now, after using it for a few minutes, the system again showed considerable lag,
making it almost unusable:
sometimes it e.g. took 2 minutes or more until the open/save file dialogue appeared,
after saying 'save page as' in Firefox.
Or Kwrite (yes, this simple app) took 3-4 minutes to load a short text file!
I thought that choosing ReiserFS may not have been a good idea.
So I made a second install of openSUSE 13.1 64bit with all updates included
on another / partition formatted ext3 (again triple boot, like on the old hard disk),
choosing /home as the original (or dd'ed) ext3 partition,
from which I deleted all hidden folders and files (the ones whose names start with a period '.')
before the install.
No improvement.
Just today one of my kids wanted to have a look at older private photos on a NTFS partition ("drive" D: ) - due to the lag that was almost impossible.
The disk light notoriously flashed at a low rate, and the noise of the hard disk never stopped.
A second, older PC (pentium dual core, smaller hard disk, less RAM, intel onboard graphics as well),
which kept me online and which I used for daily tasks,
which had the same openSUSE 13.1 64bit on it - installed from the same DVD -
and which did get the same online updates, didn't show these symptoms.
OK, that one didn't get a copy of my old /home - due to the lack of space on it's hard disk.
Now inspired by the posting https://forums.opensuse.org/showthre...84#post2647284
by Carlos, and because I began to run out of ideas,
about 2 hours ago I installed 'iotop' and did run it as root.
I was stunned, and still am: no more lag since then.
No more disk light flickering all the time.
I'm not paranoid,
but to me that looks a bit like a worm or a virus that tries to evade being detected.
Or could a call to 'iotop' from the terminal as root have similar effects for other reasons?
Still I didn't yet reboot, in order to see if the behaviour would be the same as before the call to 'iotop' then.
Mike