System process constantly writing to disk

Question

While dealing with another hard drive Problem, ive noticed in Ressource Monitor, that the process 'System' is constantly writing to my main drive.
Sometimes its about 100-200 KiB/sec, today ive watched it for a while, and its writing action was 1.5 MiB/sec for quite a while! Later on it was about 300-400 KiB/sec.
Why does this process write so much data to my disk? Considering Windows running times, this adds up to multiple times the size of my hard drive.
Anyone knows whats going on here?

Answer 1

I have a similar, though less severe issue that hopefully someone can help me with.  The System process (pid 4) on my dual core Vaio laptop is writing to disk appx. once every 500ms.  This is not performance impacting and I considered it just a
minor annoyance until I recently installed a SSD.  Since SSD lifetimes are limited by write/erase cycles, I'm concerned these writes are deteriorating my SSD; not good since they're expensive and I LOVE the performance; boots in appx. 15s, instant IE,
etc.
As with the original poster here, the same activity persists in safe mode.  Per SSD optimization guidelines I've read elsewhere, I've disabled all fetching (super, pre, etc.), indexing and all logging except Application, Security & System but the
writes persist.
Im using the latest (very recent) driver from Intel (Intel 5 Series 4 Port SATA AHCI Controller 10.8.0.1003 10/17/2011).  I've tried other drivers and while the write pattern seems to change (drive activity light no longer blinks), Resource Monitor
shows they're still there.  They also cause an additional issue of consuming CPU (?) which doesn't occur with the "recommended" driver I just mentioned.
Anyone know what these writes may be and if/how I can/should stop them?  Thanks.
(BTW, love the caffiene->code quote :-)