Reduce disk activity
Many times my laptop is continuously accessing the hard disk. The cause appears to be two fold. First updatedb is run by the daily cron job. Since I don’t use locate very often and I turn of my computer everyday everytime I turn on the computer updatedb is run and it hammers the disk drive.
To disable updatedb I made /etc/cron.daily/slocate non executable
sudo chmod -x /etc/cron.daily/slocate
The second is an apparent bug in hard disk drives that have smart control, see here, here, and here. An easy solution for me was to just create/add to /sbin/setup.sh:
#!/bin/sh
smartctl -s on /dev/hda
hdparm -B 255 /dev/hda