Can I prevent touching the disk every 10 seconds?

[stevieo]

How would I track down what is touching the hard drive every 10 or so seconds?
It seems to be multiple things because the delay changes if I remove xmd from
/etc/ttys, or if I add/remove the noatime option in /etc/fstab.

To complicate matters, it sounds like the hard drive is seeking and then
spins up when the disk is accessed. This is a laptop machine so I'd like
to stop thing from happening for the power saving if nothing else.