Hard drive runs at random, but no light and no record of drive/file access

[Carl.]

One or more times per minute the hard drive will run for about 5-10 seconds,
but the hard drive light does not come on during this time. I can make it
stop by opening OR closing almost any file (including text documents, OE, or
web pages). I have used "diskmon" and "filemon" utilities from the
following page, and nothing shows up when this happens--no special file
read/writes and no disk activity:
http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/utilities.shtml

I have tried turning off a variety of things, like virus programs, spybot,
update managers, etc. But even if these things were the cause, it seems
like it should show up in these disk monitoring programs.

A second issue is the hard drive seems to be accessed excessively (sometimes
on and off every second or two).

Is my hard drive near death, or do I have some virus (did plenty of checking
for that)?

 

[Carl.]

Add-on:

This is relatively new hardware (whole PC), but it did not do this when new.