how to get a silent harddisk?

[Joachim Förster <JOFT@gmx.de>]

Hi!

Are there any "special" Debian distribution configs oder methods to install or run a system in a way, where it boots from the harddisk and then changes to a ramdisk/tmpfs in order to keep the harddisk spun down?

I am asking because a got the following "problem":

Some weeks ago I took an old PC and configured it as an inet gateway for my LAN (woody r1). I installed several services: dnsmasq, squid, shorewall, isdnutils, noflushd ... The whole thing works very well, but the harddisk is spinning up and down *very* often (noflushd switches it off). I managed it to keep the harddisk more silent than before by tuning /proc/sys/vm/bdflush. And I moved /tmp and parts of /var to a tmpfs.
Additionally I installed squid with an empty disk cache (marked ready-only in squid.conf), to satisfy squid's to have a disk cache. By that, I wanted it to make it only use its RAM cache. But with squid running, the harddisk is as busy as before (without bdflus tuning and tmpfs).

Does anybody know, why squid uses the harddisk although its (empty disk cache, logs and other status files are on the tmpfs)?

Thanks,
 Joachim