Watch my harddrive

May 31, 2006 7:06 AM

How can I watch what is being written to my hard-drive?

I have a really noisy hard drive, it always has been and as it seems to work fine, it doesn't really bother me. It also has the added advantage of giving me an audible warning whenever my computer is really 'crunching' hard running a program.

However, recently it has made a lot of noise when nothing is being run. I'd really like to find an application that would show me what program and what data is using my hard drive during these periods.

Any suggestions?

posted by MintSauce to computers & internet (4 comments total)

You want FileMon from SysInternals.
posted by smackfu at 7:11 AM on May 31, 2006 [2 favorites]

DiskMon from SysInternals is what you're looking for. Many of their free utilieis are indispensable.

On Preview: and/or FileMon. :)
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 7:12 AM on May 31, 2006

DiskMon is not quite as useful as it only shows you information at the sector level, below the filesystem level. Filemon tells you the actual filename and path.

Another way of doing this is with Process Explorer. Recent versions have I/O graphs in addition to CPU and commit charge, which means you can just hover your mouse over the I/O graph and it will tell you the current process with the highest value, which is usually what you're interested in if the disk is being thrashed.
posted by Rhomboid at 9:31 AM on May 31, 2006

Earlier AskMe. I use the task manager most of the time for this kind of thing.
posted by Sharcho at 12:29 PM on May 31, 2006