Monitoring hard disk activity

Phal · 21 Apr 2009 at 08:43

Anyone know of an application that works like Task Manager and gives you a list of processes and lists which ones are accessing the hard disks the most?

Ive checked task manager and checked the I/O fields but that just seems to give you a total of what processes have done so far, not whats going on currently :/

I can see something is using the disk periodically and when it does I can see the disk data throughput in performance manager shoot up to the max it can handle ( compared figures to when doing a disk benchmark )

Any ideas? :E

RSR · 21 Apr 2009 at 08:58

Have you looked at Perfmon?

A

Phal · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:30

Yeah, again perfmon shows disk activity in general but it doesnt tell you whats causing it :\

iaind · 21 Apr 2009 at 13:49

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896646.aspx

Phal · 21 Apr 2009 at 16:16

Yeah- also found Diskmon

hehe

Diskmon shows you access to the disk - unfortunately it doesnt show you what process is accessing it and what it is accessing ( it refers to sectors on the HD rather than files.)

Filemon also from Sysinternals does show me what I was looking for... unfortunately it doesnt really show it to you in any meaningful way - you just get a straight dump of all files accessed during the time you capture.

Phal · 22 Apr 2009 at 13:34

Just an update for anyone that cares

I did a 30 second dump of disk activity and was surprised by what was happening. Found that a process belonging to Zetafax was causing at least 60% of the logged disk activity which made me a little suspicious lol

I disabled the Zetafax services which stopped all of this activity but this made little or no difference to the disk benchmarks I did after.

Some time later weve isolated the slow through put to being a result of a crap old server with a crap old RAID controller

Its a Dell 1800 server with a Perc 4 card - throughput on these cards seems rather poor lol. The server in question never seemed to go faster than 30MB/sec lol

We tested another 1800 with considerably less load and this only did 40MB/sec so it seems to be the RAID card :E

Did some other benchmarks on slightly newer servers - Perc 4e cards seem to get around 60-65MB/sec throughputs ( varying on load ofc ) and a Perc 5/i card I tested gave me around 110MB/sec :E

A new Dell T300 we had in the office which is fairly budget gave us a nice average of 145MB/sec throughput with its Perc 6 card and mirrored pair of 450gb disks :E

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