Re question 2: are you *absolutely* sure there is nothing running when you've tested this? What exactly have you tried?
The best way to test that would be to log out and let the computer sit at the login screen for a while. That's the only way to be sure there aren't errant processes in the background touching the disk. Even then, though, background startup processes like Apache may touch the disk if you have the web server turned on. And there's virtual memory that may be paging to disk. There are lots of possibilities. Are you sure you've eliminated all of them?
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