Random lags since update, drives seem to be sleeping often?

Desktop Environments Plasma
1

Since the update just a few hours ago, and an immediate reboot to finalise the update, I’m getting random freezes in the Dolphin interface, and listening to the sounds my PC is making, it seems my hard drives are going to sleep - the unmistakable soft click of the HDD head going into sleep position, will happen after not very long. And then I’ll go to click into a folder or something, and then I’m waiting for a good 10 seconds before anything happens, at which point I can hear the soft HDD click and it spinning up into action. Then response times are good again. But this has happened multiple times in a row in an unreasonably short amount of time, in the same session.

How can I change this hard drive sleep setting back to what it was? I’d rather none of my drives go to sleep.

UPDATE: I may have been jumping the gun, problem seems to have gone away. Just a bit panicky with new updates these days (I’ve been mentally scarred I guess, heheh) but I’ll leave this post here in case there is a setting for it, I’m curious to know.

2

Ok I can’t ignore it any longer. The HDD click noises, the delays, I’m not being paranoid after all, it’s happening constantly since the last update.

Is there a HDD sleep setting I can control?

3

Are you familiar with tlp?

If not, try installing

tlpui

Go to Disks and configure it like that:

DISK_IDLE_SECS_ON_AC=0
DISK_IDLE_SECS_ON_BAT=0

then click on DISK_DEVICE_ID → Edit and for each disk you want to do that set:

DISK_APM_LEVEL_ON_AC="255 255"
DISK_APM_LEVEL_ON_BAT="254 254"
# Timeout value until the spindle motor stops when the disk is idle
DISK_SPINDOWN_TIMEOUT_ON_AC="0 0"
DISK_SPINDOWN_TIMEOUT_ON_BAT="0 0"

Then press Save button on top, and reboot just in case (i don’t remember if it’s must, but…)
Hopefully that should work, should mean that drives will spin always (which anyway is much better for longevity of HDD)

4

I will keep it in mind for now, but it seems like something in the OS has changed and I’d like to find out what that is before installing something new and making changes that weren’t there before. It would add new variables into the mix.

5

I would revert to a previous backup then from before your issue and make sure it’s still happening. That’s likely the easiest way to make sure. It sounds mechanical to me though. I’ve never heard of an update causing clicking noises. That sounds bad.

If you don’t have a comprehensive backup yet, I would do that immediately. If that does fail, you don’t want to be without important stuff.

6

Thanks guys. It’s mysterious I guess, because the issue hasn’t come back again. @fbodymechanic I think you’re right, if there is something going on here, it’s probably mechanical, and a coincidence that it happened after the update. Some of the drives may be old.

It hasn’t been happening often enough recently for it to be a problem, so I’m going to write this off as a possible hardware issue, given it’s so intermittent.

7

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