Harddrive / Disk Access Monitor

So sometimes in my Gentoo KDE4 install, it access my hard disk like crazy for a few minutes. It makes the system almost unresponsive. It's not the built in indexer because it's happened while that is disabled, and even when it's enabled, that will show up as idle. I've checked with ksysguard and top for process, but it's always only fah taking most of the cpu and firefox, pidgin, ksysguard and some other bouncing between 0-5% each. So I'm not exactly sure what is accessing the disk. Does anyone know of a monitor, that tracks disk access? Or shows it in realtime?

Thanks

maybe this is something that might help you out:
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=591485

it doesn't say what process is using the hard drive though. i don't know much about kde apps so i can't really suggest anything with a gui.

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/19/2239226

I'm sure this could do what your looking for, tho I'm not sure how involved configuration is:
http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/

iostat is neat, but since it doesn't show the process, it's not really what I was looking for.

The rrdtool probably was what I was looking for. However, when I googling for a gentoo setup guide, one of the results had a person in a similar situation to me. Someone told him to check his cron jobs. So when I checked mine, there is updatedb on the daily cron. That is whats causing this hard drive access I can almost guarentee it. I left it for now, but I think I'll move it to the weekly cron job.

Shelnutt2 said:

iostat is neat, but since it doesn't show the process, it's not really what I was looking for.

The rrdtool probably was what I was looking for. However, when I googling for a gentoo setup guide, one of the results had a person in a similar situation to me. Someone told him to check his cron jobs. So when I checked mine, there is updatedb on the daily cron. That is whats causing this hard drive access I can almost guarentee it. I left it for now, but I think I'll move it to the weekly cron job.

Click to expand...

IOTOP is exactly what you want