How to determine source of HDD I/O

conn-fused · 03-07-2006, 06:31 AM

According to gkrellm, something is writing to my harddrive quite regularly. I want to determine what it is. Does anyone have a command that will let me monitor HDD reads and writes. Thanks!

gilead · 03-07-2006, 01:40 PM

If you're watching gkrellm, you could also have a terminal window with top showing the processes running at the time. If, for example, syslogd started using CPU time when gkrellm reported the disk was being accessed it would suggest that it was the active process using the hard disk. You could then use lsof -c syslogd to see what files it was accessing at the time.

I haven't tried this so there's probably a more efficient way to do it.

rysiekmus · 03-07-2006, 02:06 PM

Hi,

I found a very nice tool (I used to use "sar", we us it on UNIX, but I don't see this tool here on Linux). This KDE tool is:

KSysguard can be started from the start menu, using the entry KDE System Guard in the Systems menu. Alternatively, you can start it by typing ksysguard in a terminal.

KSysguard is a rewrite of KTop, the KDE 1.x task manager.

It looks just like the Windows Task Manager. I am trying to check the left panel , but I cannot figure out how to check the items like Disk Capacity (sorry, translating from Polish). I see nodes like:

1:0
Total access
Read access
Write Access, etc.

I klick and nothing is shown. Anyone know how this works? Not much said in the KDE Documentation.

Regards,
Ryszard