Constant hard drive access

Just built a new pc, and installed Arch on it. All sems fine except the hard drive seems to be constantly accessed. Ever few seconds the light comes on, and it chugs away.
It's maddening! I can't figure out what's causing it, Can't seen any processes which would be causing this.
I also have another strange problem which maybe related. Conky's network graph shows that I am constantly downloading ffrom the internet at 1-5 k/s
Some process must be causing this. Can anyone suggest how I would find it out?
Maybe something is writing to a log file somewhere. Does anyone know how to use find to report any files written to in the last few seconds?
cheers

soylent_green_is_hamster wrote:
heh heh, no - it's not a laptop.
also found the following process running:
root 6344 6296 0 14:43 ? 00:00:01 hald-addon-storage: polling /dev/sr0 (every 2 sec)
my dvd drive is device sr0, killing that stops the hard drive light blinking constantly (although now my cds/dvds obviously won't automount). That's really annoying, but I guess there's nothing I can do about that if I'm going to use a SATA dvd drive?
No, no don't kill it like that. Use:
hal-enable-polling --disable-polling /dev/sr0
I know it's silly

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< Edited by Host >

Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad. Click Utilities, then Console in the icon grid.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen. Click the Clear Display icon in the toolbar. Then take one of the actions that you're having trouble with. Select any messages that appear in the Console window. Copy them to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of which is irrelevant to solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Constant hard drive access

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