[RndTbl] optimizing hard drive, RH 7.2

[millward]

Sometimes my hard drive grinds away like
a coffee grinder. Nothing bad happens on
the screen and everything runs just fine,
but I wonder why it occasionally goes
'crazy' like that. Most of the time the hard drive
runs nice and quiet. Its a 40 gig Samsung
SV4084H.
I know what swapping is and I can't think why
it would be swaping. I've got 384 megs of
memory and gave Red Hat 7.2 128 megs of swap.
Perhaps its something I have not done.
Is there some method to optimize memory
or hard drive space?