On my laptop, I have an XP install that likes to do trivial disk IO every few minutes. Most of this activity, as seen on filemon, is concentrated on the same files. None of this is swap activity--it's mostly things like explorer doing QUERY_INFORMATION against the root directory every sixty seconds. Even though the activity is quite trivial and doesn't involve much data transfer, much of it goes straight through the system disk cache to the HDD. As a result the HDD can never spin down. Even if I set the spindown timeout to one minute, the HDD will need to spin back up almost as soon as it spins down. Are there any known hacks to force XP to trap as much disk activity as possible in the system cache, until it must hit the physical disk for something that isn't cached or when it has a healthy stack of writes pending? EWF is close to what I'm looking for, at least as far as capturing writes is concerned, but it doesn't seem to have any way to periodically commit volume changes. I don't want to make my disk static: I just want to hold changes back so everything gets written out every 15mins, or after a few MB of changes, but not more frequently.
