At times, the noise from the hard disk is very persistent. It's busy accessing something, but I only have a web browser open, and it's doing nothing that should be consuming so much of hard disk time. So I try running top and even install htop and run it, but it does not show me what's taking up so much hard disk time.
A bit of searching leads me to iotop. This cool application shows you hard disk usage in the same way that htop and top show you memory and process usage.
Install using:
sudo apt-get install -y iotop
And use as:
sudo iotop
In my case, it was the silly snapd daemon that was pointlessly using up hard disk time. So I set it to more reasonable timings.
