continuous hard disk access - slowing down my machine

Posted by suresh on Super User See other posts from Super User or by suresh
Published on 2011-11-20T00:20:38Z Indexed on 2011/11/20 1:59 UTC
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Filed under:

ubuntu-10.04

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dell

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slow

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dell-optiplex

I find from the hard disk access LED on the front of my machine that the hard disk is being accessed more often and probably because of that, my machine is quite slow. The machine becomes unresponsive even when the load as seen from w command is around 1 or so.

My desktop is optiplex 360 dell machine running Ubuntu 10.04.

My questions are:

How to quantify hard disk access and how to see if it is more than "normal" ?
If it is more than normal, what are my solutions ?

thanks

suresh

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