Comment 1 for bug 109823

I experience a similar problem with all Debian based distros. Mepis, Lime, Feisty, Gutsy, etc.
Leaving the computer completely alone, doing nothing, the hard disk accesses every 30 secs to 1 min.
(Time varies by distro).
This is on a stock desktop with nothing fancy, no extra installs or services running.

Since suspend and hibernate do not work either this means I have to shutdown when I am not using the computer, and reboot when I want to use it. In practice this means that I cant use Ubuntu, since that is just too inconvenient.

My CENTOS based system does not give this behaviour (although the disk is spinning all the time).

The various suggestions to issue the hdparm -B 255 /dev/diskdevice
a) do not work for my disk.
b) are not a solution to the problem, just a workaround.

The solution is to document what is accessing the disk so often, and allow users to kill it. (or Configure it).
Greg.