Can any of my fellow OS X nerds recommend a piece of software — ideally, freeware or cheap shareware — that would allow me to monitor disk activity on a per-disk basis? I know Activity Monitor has a disk-activity window, but so far as I can tell, it’s either for the internal hard drive only or for all disks combined (I’m not sure which). I want to monitor the activity on one of my external hard drives specifically.
The reason I ask is because “Joementum,” the 160 GB Seagate portable drive that I bought from Outpost.com last summer, has been having a problem whereby it seems to just randomly freeze up and stop working for 20 or 30 seconds at a time, every few minutes. It’s been doing this ever since I got it, but at first, I thought it was a problem with a too-large iPhoto Library (since that’s what I primarily use the drive for: to host my massive, 47.5-gigabyte “iPhoto Archive” library, which contains 57,672 photos and movies taken between July 1999 and August 2005). However, I’ve recently noticed the same behavior when working with the Finder and other applications, so I’m convinced it’s the drive that’s the problem.
Anyway, I’d love to be able to collect some visual evidence of this phenomenon, so that I can be fully armed when I call the manufacturer and demand a refund or replacement drive. Hence my wanting disk-activity monitoring software of some sort. (I can use Snapz Pro X to take a screenshot movie.)
P.S. If I do get a replacement, I think I’ll call it “Joementum the White.” :)
P.P.S. Come to think of it, “Lieberman the White” isn’t a bad nickname for the junior senator from Connecticut, considering that he was slain in a mighty battle with the Balrog Ned Lamont, only to return to life the Senate as an even more powerful wizard Independent Democrat. ;)
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Categories: Technology & Nerdy News
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January 12th, 2007 at 11:01:05 pm
There is a widget called istatpro. Check that out and some of the other widgets they have.
January 12th, 2007 at 11:47:16 pm
Hmm. At first glance, that appears only to tell me the storage space (used and free) on each drive, not a live chart of disk activity like in Activity Monitor. Thanks for the suggestion, though - widgets are probably a good place to look. I’ve gotten out of the habit of using my Dashboard much, so I didn’t think of that.
January 13th, 2007 at 12:19:28 am
Upon further review, it looks like the techical term for what I want to monitor is called “Disk I/O” … and given that every single utility I’ve found doesn’t break it down by disk, I’m beginning to suspect that it’s impossible to break down by disk, for whatever reason.
January 13th, 2007 at 12:44:47 am
Aha! I’ve figured out a UNIX solution:
iostat -d -c 10 -w 1 disk1
…where the number after w, in this case 1, is the frequency, in seconds, of how often I want it to check; and the number after c, in this case 10, is the number of times I want it to repeat said check — so in this case, it’s checking “disk1,” which happens to be my Joementum drive, every second for 10 seconds. The disk is idle at the moment, so the readout is:
KB/t tps MB/s
45.31 1 0.06
0.00 0 0.00
0.00 0 0.00
0.00 0 0.00
0.00 0 0.00
0.00 0 0.00
0.00 0 0.00
0.00 0 0.00
0.00 0 0.00
0.00 0 0.00
January 13th, 2007 at 12:47:31 am
More impressively, here’s the readout for disk0, my internal hard drive (disk0):
pb17-2:~ bloy$ iostat -d -c 10 disk0
disk0
KB/t tps MB/s
23.80 5 0.13
8.13 123 0.98
7.98 127 0.99
8.64 75 0.63
7.95 81 0.63
8.45 88 0.73
8.41 88 0.72
8.04 106 0.83
8.36 124 1.02
8.23 151 1.22
January 13th, 2007 at 12:49:01 am
Thanks to this site, this site and this site for helping me figure it out. :)
January 13th, 2007 at 7:22:48 am
GKrellM
It is similar in appearance to iStat, but I think it does more.
There is also this site for a disk read/write speed
http://www.gauchosoft.com/Software/Dash%20Monitors/