drive just starts grinding away for no reason

[Max]

Sometimes my computer will be in idle and the hard drives will just start
grinding away like it's doing some heavy processing. Only there are no
applications running, and only the most minimal services. I turn my virus
scanner and most of the services off when playing games. Yet it still does
this sometimes. It does this when not in idle as well, like when I'm playing
a game in an inopportune moment. The drive will start thrashing away and
slow down the game. Is there some sort of file system thing going on?

I have hibernate, compression, and restore all turned off.

-Max

 

[Yves Leclerc]

XP has an "indexing" service turned on by default. You could turn it off.

Microsoft Office (most versions) also have "fast find" indexing working.