Log Hard Drive Activity – How to Log Hard Drive Activity by Program in Windows XP

From my Post on What’s making my disk thrash in Windows XP?

Download Process Explorer from Microsoft / Sysinternals.

Run it and click view > Select columns. Click on the Process Performance Tab, and select "I/O Reads" and "I/O Writes".

You can do this from Task manager, but I prefer using Process Explorer.

You can then sort by these columns and see what is doing the most read / writes.

(if using Vista / 7 remember to run as ADMIN (or click file then "show details for all processes" which will do this for you)

I tend to find that Dropbox and mesh on a few machines I support seem to run wild with read/write bytes 24/7 so if you use any sycn software, first bet is to look at that, however running this tool should tell you exactly what is wrong.

In addition, you can click on any of the graphs at the top of the screen which brings up a "System Information" dialog of historic information. One of the graphs (third one down) is "I/O Bytes", Simply hover your mouse over any of the peaks, and it will tell you what is taking up the most resources. - Exactly what you want!

You can use Process Hacker to show you this information. Process Hacker is an extension of the popular Process Explorer program, albeit a lot more powerful. In the default view, there is a column titled I/O Total Rate, and it shows what each processes' disk transfer rate is (if it's performing any I/O reads or writes). This provides the transfer rate in either B/s, kB/s, or MB/s.

To see your total HDD bandwidth, you need to get a hard drive benchmark utility (like HdTach). From that, you can determine what percent of full bandwidth is being used by simply dividing the Process Hacker's I/O rate by your HDD's read or write rate (depending on what the application is doing).