Hello:
I'm typing this on Windows 8 RTM Trial using IE10. I have not observed this activity on Win 7 and IE9, but I haven't thought to look and so I would not be surprised if it exists there too.
I am using spinning disks for this test/eval period, but eventually I'd like to use SSDs for OS and possibly some of my read-only music sample libraries.
Minutes ago while I was reading and responding to a few posts in the TR forums, I noticed my hard drive light was flickering away. Knowing that I haven't installed any AV, defrag, or backup utilities on this 90 Day Trial version of Win 8, I wondered what might be using my hard drive while I'm here on the forums.
Internet Explorer appeared at the top of the list in Resource Monitor with A LOT of writes. I closed a couple of IE windows which were just resting on some website landing pages. This caused the Internet Explorer tasks to fall out of my top-writers list.
But just sitting here reading forum threads and making the occasional post, I STILL see a lot of "system" processes doing writes to the C partition. Some of the heavy hitters:
C:\$logFile (NTFS Volume Log)
C:\$MFT (NTFS Space Map)
C:\Bitmap (NTFS Master File Table)
C:\Users\....\NTUSER.DAT
C:\USERS\...\NTUSER.DAT.LOG
C:\Windows\System32\config\software.LOG
Tilecashstartview, Windows Defender, IE recovery processes (by differing names), and other system processes also keep showing up.
This begs the question: Are all these write tasks going to be the death knell for a new SSD? I'm a non-expert on this, but it just seems like a lot of write operations, constantly and never-ending, even continuing to happen when little-to-no user activity is going on.