Hard disk always working - sync_supers writting to disk every 5 second

As the topic says. My computer is on my desk while I work and I can't stand the noise of hard disk doing something every 5 seconds. I think I noticed this since 2.6.36 kernel.
When computer is completely idle it still writes to disk.
Tried Ubuntu 10.10 and got the same result. I have WD Caviar Blue 500gb. On ext4 filesystem there is jbd2/sda* doing write every 5 seconds or so and on reiserfs there is sync_supers doing the same. I guess those that is journaling acitivy, but its anoying to hear hard drive working when computer is completely idle.
Any tips?

linux wrote:Does anyone know the destination where sync_supers is writing to?
The Linux kernel mailing list has some information that may help on identifying what sync_supers is doing, http://lkml.org/lkml/2012/4/11/147.
While you wait for kernel patches, there are some mount options that other people have suggested may help:
Use noatime or at least relatime for ext* filesystems
Use the option commit=60 or commit=300 to lengthen the time between syncs of data and metadata from 5 seconds to 1 or 5 minutes. However, if the computer crashes between commits there may be some data loss.
Use hdparm to change the acoustic management settings – https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 5#p1063185

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Settings --------
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The Linux kernel mailing list has some information that may help on identifying what sync_supers is doing, http://lkml.org/lkml/2012/4/11/147.
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Hard disk always working - sync_supers writting to disk every 5 second

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