How to get rid of hudge disk activity?

I use Vista x64 on my core2duo with 4 GB of RAM and more than 300 GB of free space on hard disks. When the computer is idle for a while, tremendeous HDD activity starts. I tried to turn off services that might cause HDD activity (file fetching, security scans etc), but the problem is still there.
I hate it! This kills my drives too soon!
Does anybody know whats going on under Vista, when computer is idle?
The processes that have big IO activity when this happenes are lsass and system. The sound of HDD is like defragmentation is going on, but when checking the defrag, it shows, that previous gefrag was some days ago, and next is sceduled to be run after 4 days.

Hi Sulev,

Welcome to the forum.

It may be the Search Index that is the cause. You can disable it allowing Vista to default to the non-indexed search. This tutorial will show you how to do it.

• How to Enable or Disable Search Index in Vista

Shawn

This is probably the indexing and superfetch activity that will settle after about a week. I goes mental after installing Vista initally, but will settle. It's well worth it for indexed search.

Thanks for hints! I have already disabled almost all filetypes and locations from indexing options, so the indexing options window had message that only total 458 items indexed.
Indexing of 458 items should not generate that huge activity!? I have this computer several months already and because not so much additional files are added by me during the use (maybe 20 or so, I mostly use the other computer), I thought that indexing of some files is unlikely the reason.
Now I disabled indexing service and let's see if that helps!
I already disabled superfetch a week ago, but that did not help.

I have the same problem. Problem is somewhere else. The tremendous HDD activity doesnt come from prefetch or indexing. In my case the "System" process generates 1.2M I/O traffic. The prefetch and Indexer are located in other processes - SearchIndexer.exe and svchost.exe

My x64 Business as about 1year old and there were no hw changes recently. Backup is off.

Hello Tomas,

You might see if looking in the Resource Monitor and the link below may be able to help you find out what is causing the hard drive to run so much.

What is svchost.exe And Why Is It Running? :: the How-To Geek

Hope this helps,
Shawn

You might want to check out two threads I started a few days ago. I found a solution to both hard disk activity issues - if disabling System Restore and SuperFetch is an acceptable solution for you. It has definitely lowered my Vista induced stress/annoyance levels significantly .

System Restore hard disk trashing is driving me nuts
Excessive svchost reading of large files. What's going on?

it is not hurting your hdd btw.....