In a couple of laptops in last 2 years I faced this problem (irrespective of OS):
The disk makes a recurrent noise, I guess, of the head being parked nearly every 1 minute, unless of course it's busy with some disk heavy activity like compilation. Wonder, being a mechanical movement, it may reduce the life span of the hard drive. Is there any way to override this behavior of the drive in NetBSD? Would apm or sysutils/smartmontools be of help? The issue was also discussed in debian maling list and may provide useful insights: https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2015/06/msg01029.html Mayuresh.
