Why does the emulator perform so many writes?

I'm using the Android Emulator from IntelliJ on Kubuntu. I noticed in plasma-systemmonitor that qemu-system-x86_64 continuously does on the order of a few MB/s of disk writes even as I'm not using the emulator at all, it's just open. Sometimes it goes below 1 MB/s, sometimes up to a few dozen MB/s. Is this level of activity normal? I'm starting to wonder if this amount of writes can shorten the life of my SSD if I leave it running all the time. Or could it be another type of writes that are not disk writes? I'm not 100% sure what plasma-systemmonitor measures. I'm emulating a Pixel 4 with Google Play.