Yesterday, I noticed that there is a 5 second delay around those things which used to be instantly. However, it just occurs sometimes, usually only on the first time (maybe kernel cache).Opening a new terminal and starting the shell. It takes a while for the prompt to load. This happens in both Fish and BashOpening a file in Vim.Launching a command from Awesome WM and using the tab-completion. It takes a while until the completion show up.Creating a new commit in git, when I already ran git status which usually caches the whole repo.Each time, I see the HDD LED flicker pretty dimly. I think that means that it is busy, but the read rate is very low. That probably means that the HDD is moving around a lot without a lot of reads.I have the impression that the harddrive has a physical problem and has to re-read the sectors again and again to come up with the data. The actions used to be faster, though.Background:The drive serves as /home and is formatted with EXT4.My data is stored in a eCryptfs container.The system is a ThinkPad X220 with Kubuntu 14.04.How can I find out which files got corrupted, if any?
Lags on file access, is my HDD going to break?
hard disk
smartmon-tools may be useful in detection hard failures by the drive. However, the output is difficult to interpret.On the whole, I tend to agree with @Patrick that it there are more likely causes. But hard-drives do fail. If they are slowly degrading (instead of catastrophic failure like head crashes) the drive controller may use bad sector replacement and sector re-reads to help correct it. This gives inconsistent behavior but smartmon-tools should show record of that.