High hard drive activity, SageTV transcode?

[gmanning]

I have Sage v6 running on XP, AMD64 3400, Nvidia 7600GS with one PVR500, one Fusion5 Gold, one Fusion5 Lite, and an HDHomeRun. All was fine until a few day ago, and now for some reason the hard drive is getting slammed occasionally by something.

Previously, even with several of the tuners running, the hard drive led would only blink, and recording and playback would be OK. Now, at seemingly random times, the hard drive led goes on solid, the box is more sluggish, and playback audio drops out for a few seconds, comes back, drops, etc. The video is not affected. Last night I monitored the led for 45 minutes before I gave up waiting for it to stop.

During this hard drive activity, cpu usage is normal. At one point, Sage was idle during one of these periods, and task manager showed a SageTV_transcode process using 2% cpu (next highest below the system idle process). Could that be culprit? Do I need the transcode process? Could something using that little cpu slam the hard drive?

Any help would be appreciated, since the system is not usable for playback during these times.

Gary