Laptop: Hard drive wakes up every 5-10 seconds

[Michael Cronenworth]

Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> If it is really the hard drive, it is probably rsyslogd doing
> something with the log files. When you are logged in, the CD/DVD
> drive is also checked to see if there is a disk in the drive. This
> will also light the HDD light in most systems.
>   

I forgot to add that I disabled hal polling on /dev/sr0. I guess the 
beeping could be the dvd drive, but that would mean that hal is broken, 
which isn't that unlikely.

I performed an ls -lrt /var/log and the last touched file was wtmp over 
two minutes ago. messages hadn't been written to in 15 minutes.