At times I've seen & heard the HD on my laptop, a new IBM ThinkPad running RH 8.0 Pro, working like mad for short periods of time...even though no X display apps are running (the usual slew of processes are active in the background though).

I suspect it's the Red Hat update app (updatedb) but....what can a fella use to actively/dynamically monitor disk I/O and associate that thrashing with a process? Just as 'top' displays dynamic cpu and memory usage, I'm looking for dynamic info on disk usage by processes.

I appreciate your ideas....thanks.

the only ones I could think of is top, gtop (for GUI to top), ps (man ps gives a great deal of explanation) and df and du (which will give you hardisks space usage, etc), really with ps you can get away easily just peruse the man page.

Look at Freshmeat.net for an app called "atsar". Don't forget to set up the collector cron script with a small interval.