The most common cause I've seen of the HDD being accessed in this way and slowing down the recording is if you have MS Office installed and have not disable Fast-Find.(posted 9645 days ago)Check your start-up group to see if Fast-Find is included. If it is either tempoarily (or better yet permanently) delete it from the startup group. It's of very little benefit unless you're creating huge numbers of documents and even then I'd argue that it's worth running it.
BeeJay.