Hi,

I've only read parts of this thread, so apologies if I repeat stuff. By
default regular disc activity is to be expected. I think that there are
4 main causes of disc-activity.

1. User actions writing to disc such as saving/reading files. 

2. Kernel logging. The kernel writes logs regularly in
/var/log/messages

3. If you are using a journaling file-system (ext3, reiserfs, ...) the
journal is written regularly.

4. The kernel flushes cached block device data, i.e. disc data
corresponding to open files regularly. 

To see which processes writes to disc do 'echo 0 >
/proc/sys/vm/block_dump' and look at the output of 'dmesg'. Remember to
stop syslogd before doing this. This could help you identify if any
"unatural" disc activity is happening. Sorry about not being more
detailed. I think it is slightly complicated (I don't know the topic
well myself) and you need to know the downsides of various
countermeasures also. You can find lots of further information on
google. Try with keywords such as: laptop mode, spin down, hard drive,
dirty pages, syslogd, disable.

Also I think you said that Ubuntu is running in a virtual machine. Do
you have lots of RAM, otherwise disc-activity could be caused by
increased swapping.

Regards

Bjørn


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