Stop Blinking. Newish to Kubuntu and disk led won't stop blinking.

[Darksand]

Good day all,
This is my first post here, just got subscribed.

I can call myself a Linux noob compared to some of you I gues, I do know some about it.
My background is MCSE and VCP and am active in IT for more than 30 years. And I do work a lot with linux stuff, but when stuff really gets broken, I really do need someone to guide me through the forest.
So, why am I here? Without trying to create a fanboy storm, after decades. I am starting to feel Windows is becoming worse so this week i decided to change one of my two Windows workstation into a Linux one. And I dabbled enough in Debian, Ubuntu and Kubuntu (less in others) that my choice fell on Kubuntu.

And only a few days in, forcing myself to use it and especially under the hood, because thats where the magic is happening right?
But...... I ran into a small but annoying issue.

So my install is still pretty clean. I want to do some crazy things but for that i made another VM for testing before i put it on my workstation (like EMACS). So no crazy stuff on my machine yet.
My issue is that my disk light blinks constantly, never stops, ever.
Sadly i can not copy content of iotop -o (like the noob i am) but it shows the following process (ksystemstats) constantly having io, it does not write or read, just ~1,7% IO.
I would normally not do this, but google said it was ok. I first tried to kill it, but it came back immediately. So I removed it and the problem of the disk light was gone. Of course i do not want this service gone, it is an important part of the new plasma system monitor if i am right. But after hours of searching, i could not find anyone with a similar issue.
So now what? is there a way to configure this service so it does not access my disks 3-4 times a second?

My system:
DeskMini X300 Series with
cpu: AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 4750G with Radeon Graphics
storage: Micron/Crucial Non-Volatile memory controller
network: enp2s0 Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller disk: /dev/nvme0n1 Micron/Crucial Disk
partition: /dev/nvme0n1p1 Partition
/dev/nvme0n1p2 Partition
memory: Main Memory, 32GB

Kubuntu 21.10
plasmashell 5.22.5
Qt: 5.15.2
KDE Frameworks: 5.86.0
kf5-config: 1.0
Kernel Version 5.13..0-20-generic(64-bit)
Graphics Platform X11

[oshunluvr]

Same, but my case is on the floor so less annoying here. The most likely cause is your drive is actually being accessed. If you have trim enabled, if baloo is indexing your files, if any other process is reading-writing, if swap is being used, etc. Many drive access actions are cached s your work doesn't slow done and maintenance occurs in the background. Think about how many little files are added and removed when just using a browser? 1000s an hour I'd wager. Simple enough to prove: observe the blink rate when you're working, then close everything, log out, go away for ten minutes, then return and observe the light action. I would be surprised if it didn't nearly stop.

There's a few things that might reduce it a bit: Reduce or dis-able swap or at less adjust "swappiness." Mount tmpfs in RAM rather than on a drive. Probably a few more. You could also attack it with the sledge hammer approach of just unplugging the LED. Do you really care to know when your drive is being accessed? I guess you might if it's locked up and you were concerned about drive access before you pressed the power button. How about a small sticker that you could pull off in a emergency? Tacky, but effective

One way you can "see" what's accessing your drive is to install "iotop" and watch the console output while the computer is idle.

[oshunluvr]

I took a quick look here and netplan along with conky are the main "ticklers" of my drive.

[Darksand]

Same, but my case is on the floor so less annoying here. The most likely cause is your drive is actually being accessed. If you have trim enabled, if baloo is indexing your files, if any other process is reading-writing, if swap is being used, etc. Many drive access actions are cached s your work doesn't slow done and maintenance occurs in the background. Think about how many little files are added and removed when just using a browser? 1000s an hour I'd wager. Simple enough to prove: observe the blink rate when you're working, then close everything, log out, go away for ten minutes, then return and observe the light action. I would be surprised if it didn't nearly stop.

There's a few things that might reduce it a bit: Reduce or dis-able swap or at less adjust "swappiness." Mount tmpfs in RAM rather than on a drive. Probably a few more. You could also attack it with the sledge hammer approach of just unplugging the LED. Do you really care to know when your drive is being accessed? I guess you might if it's locked up and you were concerned about drive access before you pressed the power button. How about a small sticker that you could pull off in a emergency? Tacky, but effective

One way you can "see" what's accessing your drive is to install "iotop" and watch the console output while the computer is idle.

I agree totally with you, but.....

It does this 24/7, it never stops. I did check with iotop (see OP, it is ksystemstats doing it)
And It does stop when i uninstall ksystemstats, as in goes back to imo normal behaviour (one blink maybe every ~10s).

[jlittle]

That's one of baloo's failure modes (of several) on my desktop kubuntu. It gets its index out of kilter and keeps trying to fix it. I suggest disabling file search in system settings, and checking the size of files in ~/.local/share/baloo.

There's bugs reported for ksystemstats on bugs.kde.org. You might check if your version of plasma is affected by them. Some reports say killing that process stops the problem for a while.

[Fred47]

During a new install it takes about 24 hours for the index to be completed. If much more than that it's worth investigating.

[Darksand]

That's one of baloo's failure modes (of several) on my desktop kubuntu. It gets its index out of kilter and keeps trying to fix it. I suggest disabling file search in system settings, and checking the size of files in ~/.local/share/baloo.

There's bugs reported for ksystemstats on bugs.kde.org. You might check if your version of plasma is affected by them. Some reports say killing that process stops the problem for a while.

Yup, for sure it is the ksystemstats, can't stop that process, keeps comming back imidiatly. So i uninstalled it, fixed the problem. And it came back right after i installed it again. It is the only thing that is constantly accessing my drive, so I choose to uninstall it again.....so for now, no System Monitoring for me in the Widgets.

Havent found any bug reports yet, but hey, looked for it 2 days ago, who knows there is one now.

Went to that URL and made my first bugreport, but guys, I am just a noob, am I trusted with that?

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=445039