How to stop/decrease the periodical HDD actions?
 

Every five seconds or so, my hdd starts to do something. It's for a very short period of time, but none the less extremely annoying... It's an old laptop running redhat9. Any good ideas on how to make my hdd relax somewhat? And what is it actually doing? (kscand is doing something, but...)

I remeber when I had RH I was getting the same problem. You do nothing but suddenly
HDD start doing smth. It is really annoying. I think that is of special RH daemons, that do some checks on the file system or smth else .

Journaling File systems access your hard drive periodically to maintain the journal. The journal is insurance against open file systems in the event of an unexpected power loss/shutdown. Ext3 and reiser are journaled file systems. You can use ext2 which is not a journal file system but you will lose the speed and security that comes with a journaling file system.