Meaningless to spin down the harddisk

[Anders Torger <torger@ludd.luth.se>]

I would like to spin down the harddisk (hdparm -Y) to save battery power, but
it has turned out to be meaningless, since the harddisk is accessed in a
fairly periodical manner, about 5 times a minute. So, if I spin down the disk
(hdparm -Y /dev/hda) the disk starts running again in about ten seconds, even
if the swap is turned off, and only the very basic processes are running.

Is it normal that the disk is accessed so often, or do I have a configuration
problem? Is it the filesystem (ext2)  causing the accesses? Is there a solution,
or is it impossible to have the disk in sleep mode for long periods of time in
Linux? My kernel is 2.2.14.

-- 
/Anders Torger

"Lascia la spina, cogli la rosa"