Electrum 2.9 (Linux Mint) with Continuous Hard Drive Activity

[sJBs]

I'm new to Electrum and in the past only made use of online exchanges for keeping my coins.

I have now installed Electrum yesterday, first by following the instructions on the Electrum website (https://electrum.org/#download)  but unfortunately it does not include how to run Electrum, and then using the Getdeb repository which had Electrum 2.8.3-1~getdeb1 in any case.  The Getdeb repository (Xenial archive.getdeb.net) installed a link under Internet in the menu, thus it was idiot-proof

Now it works perfectly!   Receiving funds and making payments without a hitch.  However, while Electrum is open, my hard drive is continuously busy.  The activity stops immediately when I close Electrum.

The Electrum running is Electrum 2.9, which is a bit strange as I installed 2.8.3-1~getdeb1 last using the Getdeb repository.

I have the latest Linux Mint 18.2 with all the fix packs installed up to level 3.
The PC is an x79 based 3820, with 512GB SSD as the primary drive and 64GB ram.  (thus swapping is unlikely and was confirmed as 0 in the monitor)

I don't see any suspicious process activity using the system monitor, nothing is mentioned in the Electrum documentation or in this forum that I could find and Google did not indicate anything either.

Some questions now to eliminate the possibility that the Electrum has been compromised,
- Is it normal for Electrum to perform continuous hard drive operations?
- What is Electrum doing on my drive?
- Can this excessive hard drive activity be controlled at all using a user selectable switch in the GUI of Electrum?

Thanks

[1713929779]

1713929779

[Abdussamad]

maybe it's downloading the block headers but those are 37MB total so they shouldn't generate a lot of disk activity. given the other things you said like using a third party repo and the mismatch in the version numbers I would be advice caution. did you just install malware?

[kolloh]

Is Electrum fully synced? You should be able to see that by the icon in the lower right corner. If it is still syncing, that is likely the cause of the disk activity.

You should try running "Resource Monitor" on Windows as it should show you which file is being used for the disk activity.

[poweruser]

I have the same problem.

I have a 128 GB SSD on my BTC laptop.
OS - Fedora 26.
After upgrading to 2.9, when I run Electrum, the HDD LED goes crazy.
The HDD LED flashes at a very high frequency.
I control the write counter on this SSD. And it does not increase.
What does Electrum read from my data?

[HCP]

Just FYI, Electrum 2.9.0 portable on windows does the same thing... I have it installed on a usb thumb drive that has an activity LED... while Electrum 2.9.0 is open... that light blinks continuously until I shut Electrum down... that is just with the wallet open and sitting there. Resource Monitor indicates it is "writing" the "electrum_data\config" file

Opening that file in Notepad++ while Electrum is open... I get constant warnings that the file has been modified and would I like to re-open it. The file contents is actually unchanged.

Definitely something not quite right