kcopyd thrashing disk

[bcward]

I just recently did a complete reinstall of my gentoo system and I just noticed that my hard drive light is nearly constantly on. Looking through top it appears that there are several kcopyd processes which I am guessing are what are going to disk so much. Googling a bit turns up that kcopyd is an lvm function, and I do have several lvm volumes mounted. I am a bit concerned though since it has been thrashing my disk for at least an hour now and I don't know what it is doing. Does anyone know more about what this process is doing and why it is thrashing my disk? If it is unnecessary is there a way that I can turn it off (besides kill -9 of course).