Constant Hard Drive Activity?

I have been very happy with my new 27" iMac quad core i5 and it has worked flawlessly over the two weeks I have had it. There is one curiosity, however. Even though the hard drive is much quieter than on my older 24" iMac, I have noticed that it seems to be constantly (clicking sound) accessing or saving data in the background, even if I am not doing something that would involve disk access (e.g., saving a file). Is this normal? What is going on? I have not noticed this on my previous iMac, MacBook, or any of the PCs I have owned in the past.

Open /Applications/Utilities/Activity Monitor and see what processes are running. Hope that tells you something helpful. Look at the Disk Activity to see if it is generally reading or writing to your disks. Is there any network traffic also happening?
Do you shutdown your machine frequently or just put it to sleep?
If the machine was just new of course things like Spotlight would be busy indexing everything, but not on a machine you've had for more than a day. I know the file system likes to keep things organized in the background but that should not be constant. Can you think of any user tasks you have running in the background. Maybe Safari is building its history or updating its history for "Top Sites" or has some other errant activity going that a restart of Safari will correct.

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