[ltp] HDD access avery 5 seconds?

[Richard Neill]

Dear All,

My TP seems to access the HDD about once ever 5 seconds, even when it 
should be "idle". It makes a quiet tick, and the HDD light flickers.
It's annoying if I leave the machine on while I'm asleep, and it also 
prevents the HDD from ever spinning down to save power.

Any thoughts what it could be?

In general, what diagnostic tool can I use to track HDD access? (is 
there anything like top or netstat, but for disk access rather than cpu?)

I know it isn't this:
  http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_hard_drive_clicking
because the Load Cycle count is not changing
and it's also not beagle (which I uninstalled).

It's probably something in userspace, but *which*?  I tried to find it 
by doing
   find / -mmin -2 -print | grep -v proc | grep -v sys
but that doesn't give anything helpful either!


Thanks for your help,

Richard