Method to determine cause of HDD activity?

[zCypher]

Wondering if there is an easy way to find out what exactly the hard drive is going when crunching away. Every second or two I am getting some crunchy action going on on my D: drive. I don't see any network activity to match the HDD activity in task manager.

Any ideas?

 

[zCypher]

Ah, perhaps nevermind... resource monitor, linked to from the task manager gives some helpful info:

 

[zCypher]

Yup, I suspended the windows defender process (MsMpEng.exe) and the crunching stopped immediately. heh.

 

[Revolution 11]

Yeah, I have also noticed that MsMpEng.exe has recently caused a lot of hard drive activity/thrashing. Don't worry about the uninstall, Microsoft Security Essentials is not that good according to recent malware tests.