how to monitor hard drive disks activity ?

jan128 · 02-24-2021, 08:30 AM

My system has no visible means - no "busy light" to indicate hard drive disk activity.
But I can hear them grinding.

My cheap USB sticks lights-up when activated.

Is there a generic Linux application to tell me when my HDD disks are in use.
Such as "gparted" "scanning for devices" or mdadm / RAID updating ?
But generic - triggered by ANY disk activity.

Cheers

pan64 · 02-24-2021, 08:57 AM

google is your friend https://www.opsdash.com/blog/disk-monitoring-linux.html

lvm_ · 02-24-2021, 10:15 AM

Generic - no, but you might find what you are looking for amongst the widgets for your GUI. There is definitely one for Gnome, in KDE disk performance graphs come as standard but not the disk LEDs. Or have a look at conky - it can do all sorts of monitoring stuff.

Keith Hedger · 02-24-2021, 10:27 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by lvm_

Generic - no ...

Generic - yes!

Code:

cat /proc/diskstats
cat /proc/stat

rnturn · 02-25-2021, 09:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jan128

My system has no visible means - no "busy light" to indicate hard drive disk activity.
But I can hear them grinding.

My cheap USB sticks lights-up when activated.

Is there a generic Linux application to tell me when my HDD disks are in use.
Such as "gparted" "scanning for devices" or mdadm / RAID updating ?
But generic - triggered by ANY disk activity.

I'm an old-school "blinkenlights" kind of guy so the fact that my laptop is also lacking activity LEDs for anything (well, it does, at least, have a power LED) always bugged me: Is the system CPU-bound? I/O-bound? Completely hung?

Look for "GKrellm" (you might see it as "GKrellem2") in your distribution's repository or search for it using your search engine of choice.

HTH...

frankbell · 02-25-2021, 08:12 PM

This article names several candidates: https://www.opsdash.com/blog/disk-monitoring-linux.html

computersavvy · 02-26-2021, 06:13 PM

You could install lm-sensors and gkrellm
With gkrellm running you can see a real time graph of activity over time for each disk or as a composite. You can also monitor temps, fans, network, and more.

Soadyheid · 02-26-2021, 07:17 PM

Wot he said ^^^^^^^^

I've got a GKrellm strip permanently docked at the right hand side of my screen monitoring my CPUs, (4 cores plus 4 hyperthreads),temperatures of the cores and GPU, network traffic and both my disks. Also shows uptime. Love it!

Play Bonny!