Beginners • Strange behavior of my external HDD after formatting

I bought a 500GB Toshiba external hard drive for 60€ and formatted it to EXT4. After a few days it broke and I got a new one. Now after formatting it is constantly writing (like my old one and HTOP shows 60-160% IO and iostat TPS 1.00). I restarted my Raspberry Pi 5 a little later and the HDD continued to make noises as if something was being written to it and the Raspberry Pi 5 took about 5 minutes to boot up then it automatically restarted and then I could connect with SSH again??

Why is the hard drive behaving so strangely? I only noticed this with the Raspberry Pi 5 and never before ... I hope the hard drive doesn't break like my last one

I hope someone can help me and tell me what is happening




//EDIT
I used NTFS before without any problems, but it seemed very slow and I wanted to switch to EXT4.

//EDIT
After a long search and many attempts, I read something about "ext4lazyinit" on the Internet. That's probably the problem and for many people it takes several hours!

I am currently reformatting my HDD with "sudo mkfs.ext4 -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0 /dev/sda1" to prevent this extremely slow initialization and to do it directly during formatting, which also takes a long time but is much faster ... If I am right, this will take over 8 hours

I hope that this was my problem and that it will work "normally" again after that. If anyone else has the same problem, this was my solution if there is no new edit

//EDIT
This is my last edit.

I could delete this post but I'll leave it for people who have the same "problem" and know nothing about "ext4lazyinit", just like me.

After waiting 4 1/2 hours, the formatting is complete and the "problem" is solved! If anyone had the same problem, this could be the solution!

I wish you good luck and a good day!

Statistics: Posted by BitByte — Wed Jan 15, 2025 12:57 am

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