Laptop: Hard drive wakes up every 5-10 seconds

[Robert Moskowitz]

Michael Cronenworth wrote:
> Why would Linux be waking up every 5 to 10 seconds to write to the 
> disk when I am sitting at my desktop or sitting at the login screen? 
> (i.e. No programs running. Only 40 total wakeups seen in powertop)
>
> - Seagate 320gig SATA
> - XFS filesystem, relatime mount option enabled
> - link_power_management_policy set to min_power
> - vm.dirty_writeback_centisecs is set to 1500
>
> I even unmounted /boot (default ext3) but that did not change 
> anything. Every 5 to 10 seconds I see the HDD light flash and 
> sometimes I hear a very faint "beeping" like the drive is waking up or 
> powering off, whichever it is doing. 

Have you added noatime to your /etc/fstab?

This is one important item to stop disk writes.

Also consider changing /boot to ext2....