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every now and then, in ubuntu 18.04 , also when i only have like 1 tab in chrome, and libre office writer open, on my acer E17, i5, 8 gb ram, 1 tb wd hdd, it becomes unusable! The hard disk starts working and does not stop. A click to close the browser can take minutes to work, or even not at all. alt tab, nothing... just a hard working hdd

I found ioshop or something to system usage, but could not install it yet. ctrl-t does nothing, just hdd at work sound.

this happens every week at least 1 time, no matter what i was doing with the laptop.

anyone encountered this, any solutions?

update: it has been an hour now, even the mouse is unusable, move a bit and wait where it goes... click on x for firefox did nothing other usefull info: Excessive hard disk activity and: Continuous disk activity since upgrading to Ubuntu 18.04

update 2; hdd does not stop, going to power button laptop down...

Update 3 : sudo iotop , shows a clean lean machine, almost 0%, sometimes a few entry's peak at 0,x up to 6% , shortly and drop to zero again. And this is correct, the laptop is smooth fast and responsive. UNTIL out of no where(?) the hdd activity goes wild.

Update 4, i can not 'uncouple' the /dev/dsa3 hdd that contains ubuntu. fsck warns me that a check of the disk WILL cause heavy damage

touch /forceheck, also with sudo, can not be done, /dev/dsa3/ is coupled...

Can not UN-couple sda3... udisk error quark 14 , target is busy

dmesg shows 2 red area's ,

[    0.170817] platform MSFT0101:00: failed to claim resource 1: [mem 0xfed40000-0xfed40fff]
[    0.170822] acpi MSFT0101:00: platform device creation failed: -16

Another red area is:

[    7.124199] ata3: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
[   11.804177] ata3: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
[   17.156200] ata3: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
[   21.836184] ata3: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
[   27.188201] ata3: link is slow to respond, please be patient (ready=0)
[   56.888198] ata3: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
[   56.888204] ata3: limiting SATA link speed to 3.0 Gbps
[   61.940199] ata3: COMRESET failed (errno=-16)
[   61.940206] ata3: reset failed, giving up
[   66.721882] random: crng init done
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    please have a look in your driver message type dmesg or do you see errors in /var/log/syslog??
    – Alpy
    Mar 6, 2019 at 8:21
  • will do asap, for now just hdd activity and no respons on mouse clicks. i was typing this on another pc Mar 6, 2019 at 8:25

1 Answer 1

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This was driving me crazy for weeks.. finally I was able to solve it updating to nvidia-driver-430. Probably changing to use nouveau display driver also workaround this issue.

Ok.. in my case the problem wasn't actually the nvidia driver, but many heavy Chrome extensions that were enabled by default due to some corp policies activated when I clicked the option "Enable synchronization". After that the label "Managed by..." appears.

At that time it wasn't obvious to me that this would cause such disk writing poor performance.

The solution was to deactivate account synchronization, although this meant losing my favorites.

Also and finally, make sure you follow the instructions on this answer https://askubuntu.com/a/1035790/776744

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