[PLUG] Constant disk activity

[John Jason Jordan]

Ever since my recent dist-upgrade from Xubuntu 16.04 to 18.04 I have
been having continual disk activity. Every 30 seconds or so the drive
light comes on and stays on solid for about five seconds. The disk
activity is so intense that other operations are hindered, even mouse
movement is jerky.

I ran 'sudo iotop' and in the activity the Command column is filled
with [jbd2/sdb2-8]. All I can tell you about that list of letters and
numbers is that sdb2 is my /home partition. I've looked all over for an
iotop translation guide to convert those numbers to something
meaningful to humans, but I have failed.

Any ideas or suggestions are welcome!