Hard drive accessing data the whole time

For a good while now my primary hard drive has spent a lot of time accessing data when I'm not doing anything in particular. I can hear it now, making the hard drive noises that a drive normally would if you were telling it to access data but the only things I have open are Safari, Firefox, TextEdit and Activity Monitor. In activity monitor, both the data read and data written graphs keep fluctuating up and down.

Is there any way to find out what process is doing all this data access? Any suggestions on what it might be? Its getting mighty annoying and I'm sure its not doing anything good for my hard drive. Sometimes it gets so caught up in data access that programs I use suffer performance wise.

Infrared said:

Yes there is, if you use Leopard: Instruments.

http://developer.apple.com/document...erGuide/Introduction/chapter_1_section_1.html

Dtrace from the command line can also show you the process names.

Click to expand...

Awesome thanks. It turns out that Leopard is constantly using build_hd_index to create an index of my files. So everytime a Time Machine backup is done (i.e. once an hour), build_hd_index goes to index all the files on my backup disk. This basically means it runs non stop. I haven't found a way to stop it yet. It really is ****ing annoying. My mac used to be so darned quiet, now it makes a racket due to this one sodding process.