Is there any way to stop the live dvd from spinning up...

[curmudgeon]

every few seconds?

It is driving me nuts.

It spins up, then twenty seconds later, it spins down, then eight seconds later, it spins up again, and repeats this pattern indefinitely (I am not running any programs or doing anything whatsoever).

I certainly have enough memory to cache all of the current processes in ram (though not enough to load the entire dvd to ram).

This can't be good for the optical drive.

[avx]

IIRC, there's been something like spindaemon/spind or a similar name, I guess it's used to keep the cd/dvd in a 'ready-state' so that reading is faster. If I'm not mistaken and this daemon exists, stopping/killing it should do the trick.
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[curmudgeon]