https://writeloop.dev/tags/hdd/Recent content in HDD on WRITELOOPHugoen-usTue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://writeloop.dev/posts/how-to-fix-for-general-slowness-when-plugging-an-hdd-to-a-linux-machine-endeavouros/Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000https://writeloop.dev/posts/how-to-fix-for-general-slowness-when-plugging-an-hdd-to-a-linux-machine-endeavouros/<h2 id="the-cause">The Cause</h2> <p>The system was freezing because multiple background processes were continuously and unknowingly waking the spinning HDD, causing repeated I/O stalls over the slow USB connection.</p> <p>Things like the <code>mlocate</code> indexer and the kernel&rsquo;s own file access timestamp writes were constantly poking the drive without any obvious reason.</p> <p>The fix tackles this on three fronts:</p> <p>A) Mounting the drive with <code>noatime</code> and <code>lazytime</code> eliminates unnecessary writes triggered by simple file reads; B) Excluding the HDD paths in <code>updatedb.conf</code> stops the <code>locate</code> daemon from scanning and waking it during background indexing; C) Configuring <code>hd-idle</code> makes the drive spin down automatically after 10 minutes of inactivity.</p>