My hard drive is randomly on full blast and the CPU at 50% usage...???

Out of the blue all of a sudden my hard drive goes to work at full capacity and the CPU is at 50% usage. iotop shows nothing. I close Chromium, Gedit, and my Terminal and the hard drive continues for a minute on full blast.
I hate when the computer does these things without my approval. What's going on here?

@ewaller: Exactly! iotop *should* show something but it doesn't. If it happens again, I'll have a look at the logs. Which logs should I look in?
@litemotiv and egan: Yeah, i know updatedb does this sometimes, but in this case it lasted much much longer and updatedb didn't show up in iotop like it normally does. Also, i've kept a very very detailed log of every single thing i've installed or which settings I've modified. This incident has only happened a few times so I don't think it's a package or a cronjob. I don't think i have any cron jobs except for one. Last time it happened randomly hours into my session.
I use Gnome. DAEMONS=(syslog-ng dbus hal networkmanager !network netfs alsa !avahi-daemon @crond)
A bad sector seems like a possibility!
Last edited by trusktr (2010-10-08 19:08:31)

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My hard drive is randomly on full blast and the CPU at 50% usage...???

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