Why is Outlook 2011 constantly writing to my hard disk?

I recently installed a hard disk write monitoring program (MenuMeters), and for some reason it was reporting that my drive is constantly being written to. By closing programs one at a time, I've discovered that this is caused by Outlook 2011, but I have no idea why.

I have to keep Outlook running all the time, for work, but I'd really like to stop this constant disk writing, if possible, since I'm afraid that it's impacting my MacBook Pro's performance.

I read about some ways to more closely monitor my disk activity on another question, so I tred using sudo iotop. It revealed that something called 'Microsoft Datab' is the culprit for all these writes while Outlook is open.

Anyone have any ideas on how (if?) I can stop the constant disk writes while keeping Outlook open?

Solution 1:

Have you installed all of the service packs yet? I had tons of issues before the service pack.

Start one of the apps and use Help->Check For Updates. I just got update 14.2.3 today.

Solution 2:

Try running the Database Utility that comes with Office to resolve any database corruptions.