I have a problem. WIndows 7 is constantly accessing my hard drive even when I'm not doing anything. The hard drive light blinks every 1-2 seconds.

I do not have any anti-virus installed. I keep it off-line just to play games, so it's nothing online related.

I have disabled all indexing on every drive.

Besides games and basic libraries (like video drivers, .net and visual C), I don't have any third party software installed that would be running in the background.

I have read that setting the power to performance instead of balance is supposed to help, but it had no noticeable effect.

When I look in processes, these programs are accessing the hard drive:
svchost.exe
IAStorDataMgrSvc.exe
System
UNS.exe
explorer.exe
WmiPrvSE.exe
perfmon.exe
dllhost.exe
SearchIndexer.exe
taskhost.exe
WMIADAP.exe

I also recall seeing one about logging, but I don't remember the name of that program. The most active programs are svchost, system, perfmon, taskhost, and explorer.

How do I stop all of those processes from constantly reading and writing to the hard drive? I've got plenty of memory. Why don't they just use that instead?

When I use linux it never accesses the hard drive unless I'm actually doing something that requires accessing the hard drive.

You don't.
The Microsoft botnet is a part of you.

If you don't trust your provider, don't use it.
If you still want to use it while not trusting the provider, be aware of the time required for research, implementation and upkeep.

dllhost gives ability to start libraries (dll) as programs.
svchost is system daemon, a init system, that starts background processes (like sysv init, bsd init, systemd, launchd).
perfmon(itor) is performance and health monitor.

I am sure you can find the rest yourself and do the research with your browser. Not going to eat your cake for you (its not even my cake).

I've never understood why Windows constantly needs to do shit like that, and it has been doing so for some time. My Win10 box pretty much never gives my HDD a rest, always doing something in the background. Frankly, I doubt there is a way to stop it from doing whatever it is it's doing as it is how the OS works.

This is another reason why I like sticking to my Mac mini when doing general computing tasks. I only hear the platter working when I'm actually doing something.

There's nothing unusual for a modern(ish) Microsoft OS constantly doing something with your HDD.
The true question would be, what performance decline are you seeing?

As for hard drive lights...Toshiba in it's infinite wisdom, decided with my laptop model that HDD lights wasn't needed anymore. Have to use my ears to listen for drive ticking, and task manager to know what the frell is going on.

Listening will not work for SSDs.

LOL, true... That's really normal... There a dozens of services running in the background (ie. defrag; that's what svchost does - run services) and they all log their activity in the event log. Usually those run with a very low priority, so they will effective pause when you're actually using the machine.

Well, even in Linux, things are constantly happening.

Some DEs and WMs are far better than others at organizing priority queues. But you can just run a task manager or TOP to see that computations are constantly happening. Not to the dumb level that Windows does due to it's delayed write system, but yeah.

SearchIndexer.exe is from Windows Search service which scans drives in the background.
You should disable windows Search service:

Windows+R
enter services.msc
click ok
search for "Windows Search"
set start type: deactivated

What's a cratefor?

storage and shipping

I will suggest Spybot's Anti-Beacon as a good starting place, works on Win 7. I use the "free" version and it does seem to stop a lot of M$ access activity. I have not tried the paid version which does even more. I have used it since Win 10 was introduced without any problems and it did block the auto update to Win 10.

https://www.safer-networking.org/products/spybot-anti-beacon/

I also reduced the number of "active" connection my router is allowed to make in my router firmware. I use dd-wrt so other firmware's may not let you do this.

Lastly it may be your browser constantly doing pre-fetch and other unnecessary activity. I can give you a link on how to stop Firefox from doing some activities. I would think there are similar articles for other browsers?

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections

File Explorer, previously known as Windows Explorer, is a file manager application that is included with releases of the Microsoft Windows operating system from Windows 95 onwards. It provides a graphical user interface for accessing the file systems. It is also the component of the operating system that presents many user interface items on the monitor such as the taskbar and desktop. Controlling the computer is possible without Windows Explorer running (for example, the File | Run command in Task Manager on NT-derived versions of Windows will function without it, as will commands typed in a command prompt window). if u want to continue reading, it links to wiki page

dunno why u would stop this bit