What applications are exactly reading/writing my HDD in a given period? Application for statistics?

Question

Could you suggest any programs that makes statistics of what applications are exactly reading/writing my HDD?

Sometimes I hear my HDD clattering for a long time, which can also be caused by writing to or reading stuff from the pagefile (e.g. because of low free memory - I have 2 GBs of RAM, but on my Windows 7 x64, when using many programs, including some browsers with many tabs I sometimes run out of free memory, or have just little of it), but I would be curious if any other applications are using it too for example for writing temp files, config files, etc..

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UPDATE: OK, I can see the ACTUAL stats in either Windows Resource Monitor or Process Explorer, but can I also create statistics (stored in files) of a given period? Thanks!

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Since this thread is supposedly an "exact duplicate" of mine, please someone describe some techniques that can be used to monitor activity over a period of hours to see what the system is doing. (Event viewer doesn't even come close.)

Answer 1

Performance Monitor also comes with Windows 7.

1. Start logging with the System - System Performance log. It will run for 60 seconds.

   
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2. View the report. It shows which files are accessed most in Hot Files. You can click the + to the left of the file to find out which images (processes) are accessing it, and how much. You can also view which images (processes) read/write most to a specific disk in the Disk Breakdown breakdown section, just click the + to the left of the disk number.

   
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3. For additional customisations, including logging time, you can create your own (User Defined) data collector. This is actually a rather advanced too, there is a lot of things you can log. I would recommend starting by basing off one of the System sets as a template, and just extending the time it runs for.

Answer 2

Either the Windows Resource Monitor (built in)

or the Sysinternals Process Explorer in either the system information view for graphs

or the main window with the I/O delta read/write bytes columns enabled for numbers

will give you an ad-hoc view about what's doing which amount of I/O.

If you need exact throughput numbers per process or per handle, you would want to look at the per process read/write columns.