Akkana, thank you for your outstanding help to track this down. Indeed it seems that your motherboard flashes the light for USB access and your IDE drive is never touched at all.
So actually everything seems to work just as it's meant to be. The polling is done to automatically mount media in removable media devices like CD-ROMs or your card reader. This is at least necessary for IDE CD-ROMs. Out of interest, if you kill the two hal helpers, does automounting of inserted media still work for your USB flash reader? -- hal's automount_enabled_hint causes disk to beep every few seconds https://launchpad.net/bugs/27323 -- desktop-bugs mailing list desktop-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/desktop-bugs
