Hard drive noises when performing operations

[safsf]

I have gimp's tile cache size set to 5 GB (I have 8GB RAM, 1.75G in use). The temp and swap folders are set to a ramdisk. However, whenever I perform some function in gimp (say: moving a layer, filling a region, showing/hiding a layer), I hear what sounds like hard disk access.
How can I get GIMP to use my RAM which is more than sufficient for the size of images I edit, and not touch my disk except when saving and loading?

[Ofnuts]

If Gimp uses you disk, then either it is normal system swapping (your performance monitor will tell) or Gimp using its own tile swap on disk (*.swp disk in your Gimp profile). But it can also be you system preventively/proactively moving the memory of other processes to disk to make sure Gimp has the RAM it needs.