How do I discover which process is making my hard drive go crazy? (need disk io equivalent of task manager's cpu % column)

Question

When I notice my system getting sluggish, the first thing I do is open up Task Manager to see if some process or another is using up 100% of the cpu. What do I do when I hear my hard drive churning away like crazy, but the cpu is 99% idle? How do I sort my processes by "disk io in last 5 secods" or something like that?

score 4 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 06 '09 at 17:53

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Filemon or procmon from the sysinternals suite; process explorer also helps. Free download, unzip and run them as admin user...

answered Aug 06 '09 at 17:53

Bart Silverstrim

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score 3 · Answer 2 · answered Aug 06 '09 at 17:56

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If you start task manager and go to the process tab, you can then add columns from the View menu. IO Writes and Reads might show you right away. If not I would go with the sysinternals stuff Bart mentioned.

answered Aug 06 '09 at 17:56

Kyle Brandt

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I found delta I/O Delta Read and I/O Delta Write to be the most helpful. – Scott Nov 11 '09 at 16:06

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 07 '09 at 21:03

You might compare snapshots using wmic:

wmic.exe process list io /every:10 /repeat:6

This command will take a snapshot of your process IO 6 times at 10 second intervals.

This command:

wmic process list  statistics /format:list

will give you non-process specific IO as well, like paging file statistics.

Rob

How do I discover which process is making my hard drive go crazy? (need disk io equivalent of task manager's cpu % column)

3 Answers3