Lightroom Ver 6.14 hard drive use?

I've noticed that after I add or delete several photos from LR 6.14 my hard drive light stays blinking for a few minutes. If I add or delete files from the Organizer in Photoshop Elements 2018 the hard drive only blinks for a few seconds. I have about 1200 photos in Elements and about 22,000 in Lightroom. I optimize the Lightroom catalog weekly. Does anyone know why this is happening? I don't recall this happening with prior Lightroom versions. I use Windows 7 Professional and have 12 gig of ram if that helps. Any suggestions are appreciated. Thanks.

Can you explain exactly what you mean. Are you saying it takes a long time to import and build previews or that the drive stays active after it has finished importing/building previews? What preview settings do you have selected?

I assume its taking a while to make the previews. I've tried turning "graphics processor" on and off in the Performance tab under Preferences but I don't notice much difference. Where do you adjust the preview settings? Is it in the Preferences section? I may have missed it or possibly have it set wrong. Thanks for any help on this issue.

You set the preview preference on the Import screen. If you use import presets (which you should) the preference may be set as part of that.

You should note that if you select 1:1 previews the import process will be much slower, but when you come to develop the images it will be faster as the 1:1 previews will already exist. If you select smaller previews at import time, the import process will be faster but image development/switching between images may be slower because LR will need to create the 1:1 preview on the fly. I usual preferred the former choice and would go make a cup of tea while the import ran so that image developing would be faster.

The latest version of Lightroom Classic CC doesn't have this issue as Adobe have been focusing on speeding up LR and have improved the import system and the handling of previews dramatically.