'updatedb' : is it really mandatory, can I switch it off and how ?!

[Trouilliez Vincent]

Hi boys,

I am trying to make my PC silent, which includes sorting out my hard
drive.
I am extremely annoyed at the constant activity it shows. Even when the
system is idle and I have been doing nothing but reading some man page,
the system keeps accessing my hard drive all the time, a little 'squirt'
every few seconds. I gave up trying to find out wha twas causing this
and ended up hiding the problem by using 'hdparm' to adjust the
'acoustic management ' feature of the drive. Basically just a 'hdparm -M
128 /dev/hda'. 
However every now and then, it suffers from the "windows" syndrome.
That is, system is idle, and all of a sudden it will start accessing the
drive in an extremely n,oisy manner, for at least 10 consecutive seconds
that then feel like eternity.  It was so so long that even got the time
to start a terminal and run the 'top' command whislt it was torturing my
drive.  The process that came up was apparently something called
'updatedb'.

What is this thing, and how can I proceed to stop it from torturing
uselessly both my drive, and my ears ?

Vince, needs silence to concentrate on his work and enjoy his Ubuntu
fully... :o)

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