[MPlayer-users] Cache limit...

[Jan Knutar]

> Only speaking for myself, there is nothing else spinning up the drives
> but the videos I'm playing.  The few things I'm doing in the 
background
> (eg GAIM) don't touch the disk.

You've probably got atleast syslog and cron that touches the disk. Gaim 
might be writing to its logs.  Simply accessing the start menu of Gnome 
or KDE will trigger reads, which will touch the access time, which will 
be pushed to disk at one point or another.

In a modern OS, there's over a hundred things that touch the disk in one 
way or another.

The laptop-mode for Linux helps a bit, but the default in that is to 
push all changes to disk every 10 minutes if not forced to do it 
earlier due to memory pressure.