Optical Disk Drive constantly checking for Disk

Support
1

Hey everyone,
I am running Manjaro KDE and have a annoying issue with the optical disk drive.
The drive (Samsung BD-ROM) checks for Disk every some minutes. If someone knows Windows; there this only happens when you click on the assigned drive letter in explorer.
No disk in the drive, not mounted, nothing. Since it’s obviously a mechanical process to check for an inserted disk, the drive now always clicks and humms…
Is there any way to prevent/disable this?

Help would be very much appreciated!

Operating System: Manjaro Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 5.24.2
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.91.0
Qt Version: 5.15.2
Kernel Version: 5.15.25-1-MANJARO (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 16 × AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor
Memory: 62,8 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: AMD Radeon RX 6900 XT

2

Check with smartctl for example:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count

then you can set the timer to 240 for example via hdparam:

sudo hdparm -B 240 /dev/sda

This might be helpful too Power management - ArchWiki

3

Maybe the disc (and not the drive) is faulty.

4 
sudo smartctl -a /dev/sda | grep Load_Cycle_Count

has no result, I do not understand what this command supposed to do though, sorry.

5

There is no disk in the drive. The drive is just checking for one…

6

You mentioned you’re using KDE.

I face this “issue” due to the Recently Accessed files / folders / history “feature” of KDE Plasma.

Inadvertently, my network shares will automatically mount, even though I don’t visit them. It wasn’t until I realized that it’s because I visited them in the past (or accessed a file on one of them in the past), that something in KDE was triggering an I/O operation to a file or folder in the background.

There are a few sneaky ways this can happen:

  • Any KDialog instance can trigger this (downloading from a website, opening a file in another application, etc)
    – To be clear, I’m referring to accessing other locations and files, but doing this in KDialog triggers an unintentional I/O to a location / file on my network share.
  • Plasma widgets, menus, and launchers can trigger it the same way as described above.
  • Dolphin can inadvertently do what I described above as well.
  • KRunner can inadvertently do what I described above as well.

One thing you can try to temporarily subdue this issue if to clear your entire Plasma/KDE history outright.

The main difference is you “hear” attempts to access something (optical drive), whereas I do not “hear” anything. I know it does when I manually check my mounts and notice I have a handful of network shares mounted, even though I did not intentionally invoke them myself. If network shares could make a “sound”, then I would “hear” it as well. :wink:

1 Like
7

In your situation, I would recommend you turn your PC off, open the box, and check for the dust inside your CD-ROM.