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I am looking for a program/app that will show me the current data rate that is being written and/or read from the hard drive in real time, for the Mac.

I want to see the rate at which the hard drive is reading/writing when I'm rendering video files in After Effects and Final Cut.

Is there a program to do such a task??

3 Answers 3

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Have you tried iStats Menu? No longer free but it has a disk activity module.

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  • I have, and this seems to work the best. Thanks!
    – v15
    Jun 11, 2010 at 13:12
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Open up the terminal and use the following command

while true ; do iostat -w 2 ; done

You will see something like this:

  0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  36 12 52  2.46 2.28 1.80
   23.81 135  3.14     0.00   0  0.00  41 13 46  2.46 2.28 1.80
    5.60  12  0.07     0.00   0  0.00  36 12 52  2.46 2.28 1.80
    8.00   1  0.01     0.00   0  0.00  37 12 51  2.34 2.26 1.80
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  46 12 41  2.34 2.26 1.80
    4.00   1  0.01     0.00   0  0.00  38 11 51  2.15 2.22 1.79
   12.00   2  0.02     0.00   0  0.00  43 14 43  2.15 2.22 1.79
    4.00   4  0.02     0.00   0  0.00  72 15 13  2.15 2.22 1.79
    4.00   4  0.02     0.00   0  0.00  72 12 16  2.22 2.23 1.79
    4.00   3  0.01     0.00   0  0.00  62 13 24  2.22 2.23 1.79
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  • iostat on OSX (tested on 10.9) actually repeats indefinitely when invoked as iostat -w 2, there is no need to use the while loop Mar 5, 2014 at 11:50
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Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder should do this just fine.

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  • hmm, i'm finding that to be inaccurate. I'm writing files that are several gigabytes, and it shows that no data is being written. Is there another program out there that would do this?
    – v15
    Jun 7, 2010 at 15:30
  • Silly question, but how do you know Activity Monitor is inaccurate without an accurate tool?
    – Garry
    Jun 7, 2010 at 15:32
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    @Garry: Did you miss the comment right above yours? He knows for sure he is writing some non-zero amount, and the activity monitor shows zero. Imagine I said "My speedometer is inaccurate...I'm driving, the car is moving, but it says zero MPH" and you asked "How do you know your speedometer is inaccurate without an accurate tool?"
    – davr
    Jun 7, 2010 at 16:02
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    I have noticed there are to radio buttons in Activity Monitor under "Disk actitivty": "I/O" and "Data". You should probably check that.
    – Genba
    Jun 7, 2010 at 16:51
  • @davr: I guessed I missed that bit, which makes my comment look a little silly :-)
    – Garry
    Jun 8, 2010 at 17:18

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