I am running a Dell Windows 11 Enterprise 21H2 PC. I've noticed lately that whenever I don't touch the keyboard or mouse for about 5 minutes (an idle state), I suddenly hear massive disk I/O coming from the tower; I can hear it thrashing the way it would if I were copying gigs of files from 5 different folders at the same time.
I read another post titled What does Windows 10 use your disk for when you are absent?, but that doesn't say much about discovering what exactly is the source of the disk thrashing. I would like to know precisely what my PC is doing during the crazy disk I/O and am wondering how I could discover that. Going into Task Manager doesn't seem like much benefit because the moment I touch keyboard or mouse and the idle state ends, the I/O ends instantly.
If it's defragging the drives or other system tasks, I'm fine with that. But my PC is aggressively managed by my company and they push all kinds of stuff to my PC, they run stuff without my knowledge or consent, etc. So I'm curious if my company is causing the disk thrashing via some secret process they have pushed down to me. I have asked, and they won't ever tell me anything.
Is there any way to discover what exactly is causing the disk thrashing while my PC is idle? I am an Admin on the PC.
