Question: I am using Windows XP and am looking for a utility that can tell me the percentage of hard drive activity a program is using. ?
Basically, I’m looking for something like Task Manager and its ability to show CPU use but for hard drive activity. ?There are many times where my computer will be mostly idle on CPU, but because of hard drive activity, everything slows down. ?I’d like to see the programs causing that.
If it can be done by using something like SNMP or WMI with another program, I am also open to that. ?It doesn’t have to be realtime as long as I can tell what is doing the most hard drive thrashing.
Answer: What you are looking for is Process Explorer. Go to “View” -> ?”Select Columns” then select the tab “Process Performance” and select what you want to know:
- I/O Delta Read – The total amount of reading operations caused by this process in real-time
- I/O Delta Read Bytes – The total amount of reading operations caused by this process in bytes in real-time
- I/O Delta Write – The total amount of writing operations caused by this process in real-time
- I/O Delta Write Bytes – The total amount of writing operations caused by this process in bytes in real-time
- I/O Delta Other – The total amount of other operations caused by this process in bytes real-time
- I/O Delta Other Bytes – The total amount of other operations caused by this process in bytes in real-time
- I/O Delta Total Bytes – The total amount of all operations (read, write, other) caused by this process in bytes in real-time
It looks something like that: