constant hard drive activity on my laptop...?

[David Curry]

Christopher J. Bottaro wrote:

>Hello again,
>
>        This is the second laptop I have got where this happens.  There is tiny
>hard drive activity consistently every 2-3 secs.  By "tiny" I mean I can
>hear the hard drive make a small noise for a split second.  Sometimes its
>so small that the hard drive activity light doesn't come on.  The problem
>is that it happens consistently every 2-3 secs...very annoying and also
>causes me to be suspect.
>
>        Top doesn't show any interesting.  I am using KDE 3.3.2.  Does anyone have
>any ideas about what might be causing this?  Are there some services or
>daemons that I can turn off?
>
>Thanks for the help.
>
>  
>
Have you tried running smartctl?  You might be interested, also, in a 
message posted on fedora-list a short while back advising subscribers 
that the 2.6.10 kernels seemed to be hard on disks.  In a thread titled, 
"fc3 with kernel 2.6.10 stresses hard disk", Walter Neumann reported,

>My current kernel is 2.6.10-1.766_FC3, but earlier 2.6.10 kernels did
>the same. Booting back into a 2.6.9 kernel fixes the problem.
>
>I fixed the problem for myself in 2.6.10 by adding "hdparm -B254
>/dev/hda" to my startup scripts.
>