harddrive makes WAY more noise under redhat than XP on dual boot
 

i bought RedHat Enterprise WS 3 and installed it on a dual boot system with XP home on the bigger partition.

the installation is great, and although i only initially installed linux for using for programming assignments, i can see myself starting to use linux as my main OS.

my questions is this: when the system is idle on XP or not really doing very much, the whooshing noise of the hard disk is very quiet. but when i am in linux, it is constantly at is peak volume. this gradually becomes annoying as i listen to very quiet music while i study, and commonly leave my computer on while i sleep (it is in my bedroom) downloading stuff.

cpu usage is at 0 - 5% on the system monitor and ram and swap are on the low end of the graph.

what could be wrong? or is anything wrong? is it possible to make linux quieter?


my system is roughly: p4 2.66 512M RAM 120G 7200RPM HD and normally fairly quiet

That's strange. I've had Mandrake/XP dual boots on several different PC's and I've never noticed a difference in the noise. If the system is idle the hard disk should be spinning at some idle rate and making a certain amount of noise. I don't actually know that much about OS's, but I can't think of a reason why this is. Sorry I can't be more helpful.