Itunes on NDAS, recently experiencing large network traffic increase, flooding.

First of all; it’s unlikely that this activity is hurting anything or degrading performance on your network. (If it’s bogging down your computer, then you might have issues in the computer itself: low RAM, slow antivirus, too many “helper” programs running, etc.)

Two most likely possibilities with networked disk storage (“networked [direct] attached storage” or NAS or NDAS):

Because your computer OS thinks of these disks as being “directly attached”, then your anti-virus or anti-spyware programs may think of them that way as well. If that’s the case then the high network activity you see may be due to a scan of the data on your networked drive.

Another possibility is iTunes doing some maintenance task or other. That could be anything from a “Genius” update to a playlist backup to just a routine scan to make sure the iTunes database is up to date.

Again, if your antivirus program is scanning data here, then you may want to go into the “Exclusions” settings in your AV program and tell it to ignore data that is in your iTunes library folders. (Note: don’t exclude the file types—.mp3 and such—just the exclude the folders. That way the song files will be scanned on their way in to the library, or if you play a track from some other source.)

If you think that it’s iTunes and you want it to stop; then change the iTunes settings so that it doesn’t load up automatically when you start your computer or plug in your iPod, but will only start when you expressly command it. It will still do those things, but now it will only do it when you load it into your computer.

Hope this is helpful.