hard disk spin down

[Mario Vukelic]

On Sat, 2007-10-06 at 23:26 +0200, pol wrote:
> Most of the time spent on my laptop is reading. Often the laptop is not
> powered, so that i can hear the inner disk spinning down and restarting
> every dozen seconds, because many processes are running, while i am
> reading.  
> My question is: is there a way to force processes not to read and write so
> often? 
> Alternatively, is it safe disabling the disk spin down? 

Do you use the default file system, ext3, or do you use reiserfs? What's
the output of the mount command in a terminal?

> I have noticed that the hdparm package is also installed, but it is not
> running. It must have been disabled, not to clash with 
> kde-guidance-powermanager. Is that correct?

hdparm is only running briefly on boot. It sets the settings that are
specified in /etc/hdparm.conf, then exits.