E drive is congested, but it has more than 10 GB space left.

Coming back to my original issue, does IO latency contributes to large log file?

Its the MDF file.

Here is the message;

SQL Server has encountered 1713 occurrence(s) of IO requests taking longer than 15 seconds to complete on file [E:\Databases\SQLDATA\epddc_993_DEV_Data.MDF] in database [epddc_993_DEV] (11)....

No, replication is not done, but you are correct when you said there can be lots of updates and index creations too. There are many updates and new indexes are...