What's using my harddisk? or, how to silence my computer

[Stefan Baums <sb51@soas.ac.uk>]

Hi all!

I'm using Debian (the most recent packages) on a laptop with a pretty
noisy harddisk (a Toshiba harddisk inside an HP Omnibook), and I'm
sick to death of hearing it all the time I'm using my computer (and, of
course, it's draining the battery as well). So I set my harddisk timeout
to 30 seconds. But _something_ keeps accessing the disk. I tried strace
on the most obvious candidates (xemacs, gnome-panel), but could not
find the guilty program.

Any suggestions anyone on how to monitor harddisk access on my
computer? There must be a way to at least write a text on it without
constant disk access (autosave concerns aside).

Thanks in advance,
Stefan

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