During editing of an image does Photoshop periodically access the disk where the image came from?

I have a large external HDD where I keep all my photo images.  In the Photoshop (Beta) settings I've set the scratch disk to a different drive, one that is an internal SSD.  What I've noticed is that as I am editing an image after opening it from the HDD there is periodic activity on the HDD that I suspect is being done by Photoshop.  No other applications use the HDD.  The activity on the HDD seemes to be in response to some editing action I've taken.  Then it seems that about every 5 minutes or so there is HDD activity and the user interface of Photoshop stops responding for about 10 to 15 seconds.  I'd appreciate an explanation of this behavior and maybe a way to get around it.  Thanks in advance to anyone / everyone who wants to reply.  I'm running on Windows 11 with all updates installed.