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My MacMini has a full-time external drive attached to it. Every now and then, the drive just goes nuts with activity, when ostensibly nothing much is going on with the computer.

Is there an app on the Mac that shows me what apps/processes are hitting a specific hard drive? Kind of like FileMon on Windows?

Details: The attached drive is NTFS formatted - I am using Paragon NTFS for Mac 8.0 to run it.

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How long is the burst of activity? If it's under 30 seconds, it could be cache write-backs, reparse points, journal checkpointing, or even something like super-block backup validation. A Unix system that doesn't have a user in front of it is hardly quiescent, and the disk activity may not be coming from user-space. – msw Jun 23 '10 at 3:40
@msw So how do I find out what is hitting the drive? – AngryHacker Jun 23 '10 at 4:21
With difficulty, probably. I'd start by looking at the system logs. It sounds like this is a curiosity for you rather than a problem; you'll certainly learn a bit about your system in the process. – msw Jun 23 '10 at 7:24
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