laptop disk access

[Cameron Hutchison]

Once upon a time Matt Zimmerman said...
> On Fri, Nov 12, 2004 at 10:58:41AM -0800, Mike Bate wrote:
> 
> > With both Warty and Hoary, my laptop does a hard disk access every few 
> > seconds, even when the machine has been just sitting for an hour.
> > 
> > What is happening, and can/should/how do I stop this or reduce the 
> > frequency?
> > 
> > ('hdparm -S20 /dev/hda' was suggested on IRC, no change)
> 
> https://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/IdleDisk
> 
> has some hints.

On my system, I found the main culprit to be postfix (and this is with
noatime set on the filesystem).

To Ubuntu devs: Is postfix a reasonable choice for most desktops? I'd
have thought a simple forwarding mailer would be better with all mail
root/postmaster/etc mail setup to forward to the user created upon
installation, and the forwarding mailer setup to forward to their
default email account (whatever that is).

I doubt most people are going to be checking mail on their local
machine.

Or perhaps a simple local mail daemon that does not forward anywhere,
setup for purely local delivery. Even if that is how postfix is set up
by default, postfix still seems like overkill. My machine is now quieter
now I've stopped it.