Recently when I boot up my machine, my hdd light is on as if it were being scanned or defragged, but when I check my startup list, there is nothing that I could assume would do such a thing. I run Avira Personal 8, would that cause it to do this, like startup scan? It lasts about a couple minutes but I can't seem to figure it out!
Probably relates to superfetching which preloads most often used apps into memory at start up. To test you could go into services and stop the superfetch service as soon as you get to desktop and see if the HD activity stops.