How can I find out what is using the hard disk?

windows hard-drive performance display

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Solution 1

Windows 7 and 8 has a nice and improved Resource Monitor that shows some nice stats about the current disk activity.

Resource monitor screen shot

Solution 2

I find it really strange that Process Explorer is not showing it. It should show all processes, normally, and you should see the culprit in it.

Try eventually with Process Monitor. It will be more messy and will require filtering, but at least you should find for sure what is using your hard-drive.

procmon screenshot

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Ignacio Soler Garcia

I am now acting as a delivery manager focused on the three main pillars of software creation: People, Procedures and Code working mainly with Javascript teams (React / Redux / Node) building applications 100% in the cloud with CI/CD, etc. I am open to proposals, let's talk. Previously I used to be an experienced technical leader commanding .Net technologies, passionate about Agile methodologies and a people person.

Updated on September 17, 2022

Comments

Ignacio Soler Garcia over 1 year

Possible Duplicates:
hard drive activity by program?
What is causing hard drive grinding?

Once or twice a day my computer starts writing significantly hard to the hard drive, the HD led is ON and the performance hit is noticeable. A strange observation is that the Task Viewer does not show I/O activity - even Process Explorer shows no CPU activity and no I/O bytes read or written.

Is there a way to know which application is using the hard drive and how much data is it reading or writing?
- Admin over 14 years
  
  This has been asked before. You can find more info here: superuser.com/questions/69326/hard-drive-activity-by-program or here: superuser.com/questions/13192/…
- Admin over 14 years
  
  The answers there does not apply to my question as I said that the Process Explorer is not showing anything.
- Admin over 14 years
  
  @Ivo - this is not a duplicate, as he tried the solutions on the other questions, and they are not working for him, as he explained. This is a different problem. Commenting over the other question won't help him, as he can't describe his problem, he would only be able to post an answer... And this is not an answer, it's a question. Voting to reopen.
- Admin over 14 years
  
  Voila :) Though I hope someone will actually solve his problem here then!
Ignacio Soler Garcia over 14 years

As far as I know ProcessExplorer does not show system HD activity. Maybe I can try with Process Monitor but will be hard to diagnotic anyway due to the fact that when this happens the performance degradation is really heavy.
Michael Burr over 10 years

Thanks! For me 'Resource Monitor' shows the I/O as belonging to "System" - I wonder if procexp isn't accounting for it because of that (though procexp does account for CPU use by 'System"). Anyway, 'Resource Monitor' also shows the file(s) that are accounting for the I/O , so it's clear that Firefox is responsible. Time to restart my browser.