Comments on: Watch my harddrive

Question: Watch my harddrive

MintSauce — Wed, 31 May 2006 07:06:19 -0800

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?

By: smackfu

smackfu — Wed, 31 May 2006 07:11:03 -0800

You want FileMon from SysInternals.

By: Ethereal Bligh

Ethereal Bligh — Wed, 31 May 2006 07:12:05 -0800

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

On Preview: and/or FileMon. :)

By: Rhomboid

Rhomboid — Wed, 31 May 2006 09:31:48 -0800

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.

By: Sharcho

Sharcho — Wed, 31 May 2006 12:29:47 -0800

Earlier AskMe. I use the task manager most of the time for this kind of thing.