Monitoring Hard Drive Activity

tigermatt

Yesterday, one of my computers here crashed and I went looking for the reason why. It turned out there was a dodgy power connector connecting the hard drive to the power supply. I changed the connection to a spare cable and all worked fine.

However, I now have a constant Hard Drive activity light on the front of the box. This machine usually has hard drive activity every few seconds, but it seems a little abnormal that the light is on constantly. I think I may have nudged the connector on the motherboard connecting the small LED, but I can't be sure and it is difficult to access the PC.

Therefore, does anyone know of a freeware utility that I can use to see the activity on the Hard Disk at any one time? I would have expected the Windows Task Manager to include this, but unfortunately Microsoft seem to have looked over this...

Any ideas? Thanks in advance.

Chippy_Minton

All modern ATA/IDE hard drives support SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology), though it is usually disabled by default. You just need to go into the computer's BIOS and enable it.

Have a look at DiskCheckup for viewing the data provided by SMART.

Toxteth_OGrady

Give this a try.

From the symptoms I believe your diagnosis is correct. You normally get continuous light if you have the mobo connectors back to front or only one of the two connected.

:cool:

TOG

tigermatt

Thanks to both TOG and Chippy_Minton - I'm going to have a look at the link TOG gave me for a temporary solution, but I will be switching SMART on when I reboot the computer next. (It runs 24 hours)

Many thanks for your replies.

tigermatt

Chippy_Minton wrote:

All modern ATA/IDE hard drives support SMART (Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology)

Once again, I turn to Wikipedia to learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-Monitoring%2C_Analysis_and_Reporting_Technology

JohalaReewi

If using Windows XP, you can run the performance utility to check on disk drive accesses (and other stuff).

Programs > Administrative Tools > Performance

or possibly

Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Performance

To add/remove items to monitor, click on the properties icon (CTL-Q)

tigermatt

JohalaReewi wrote:

If using Windows XP, you can run the performance utility to check on disk drive accesses (and other stuff).

Programs > Administrative Tools > Performance

or possibly

Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Performance

To add/remove items to monitor, click on the properties icon (CTL-Q)

I've already tried this but I would rather a seperate program like TOG or Chippy_Minton suggested.

Thanks anyway. :T

albertross_2

If you want to see exactly what your hard disk is doing, i.e. what process is reading what file, in realtime, this free utility does it.

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Filemon.html

These may also be of use:

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Diskmon.html

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Regmon.html

http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html

Have a browse around the site, it the best freeware diagnostic site around, if you want to get down to the nuts and bolts of what is going on, on your PC..

This site is also quite good:

http://www.nirsoft.net/