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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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