Find Out Which Applications Read / Write the Most on Your Hard Disk with iotop

If you've ever wondered what is thrashing your hard drive but can't figure out which process it is, you can use the iotop utility to help.

To install iotop in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install iotop

The iotop utility works the same as the top command that shows system process activity. Just open up a terminal window and type iotop to see a display of all processes and threads, and the amount of disk activity going on.

You can use the left and right arrow keys to change the sorting, and the R key to reverse the sort—but the really useful option is the O key, which changes the display to only show the threads with I/O activity.

[via lifehacker]