# Hard drive noise when Samba share is accessed



## cbstryker (Jul 15, 2010)

Ok, so this is a little odd problem. Actually, first just to give a background on the problem.

I'm a Linux user, I'm far more familiar with Linux than any Unix system. Although having just installed FreeBSD I'm finding the environment very similar. I had Linux running on every machine at my house:

Ubuntu 9.10 minimal install with XBMC for a media center
Ubuntu 10.04 LTS x64, openSUSE 11.2 x64 and Windows 7 x64 on my main machine
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS x32 on an old re-purposed laptop as a file server/downloader (now it has FreeBSD 8.0)

My file server serves all the files for my media center, but although I like Ubuntu I'll be the first to say that it's fairly unstable. It's great for a desktop system, where you (at least I) find myself always doing something and restarting X or even rebooting isn't an issue. But on a file server you want stability, so I went with FreeBSD. Everything is running great, I have my samba share setup just as before (nothing needed changing on my media center, ie. same share name, etc).

But there is just one tiny-teeny problem that's bugging the hell out of me.

My media files are on an external 1TB ntfs hard drive and when they are being accessed by the media center, the MAIN hard drive on the laptop makes noise. It's a high pitched, barely audible squeaking sound that's intermittent every second or half second and it's really annoying. When I had Ubuntu running on it it never did this before.

Technically nothing should need to be accessed on the main HDD while only a share on an external drive is being read. I thought that maybe the files are being cached on the swap, so I tried turning it off but that didn't help.

I know it's super vague, but anyone have any ideas on this?


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## adamk (Jul 15, 2010)

cbstryker said:
			
		

> Technically nothing should need to be accessed on the main HDD while only a share on an external drive is being read.



samba logs, maybe?

Adam


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