Assistance finding out what process is writing to the disk drive

[Sam Sharpe]

2009/11/30 John Nissley <jnissley at nissley.org>:
> I have a Fedora 11 server running 2.6.30.9-96.fc11.x86_64.  I recently
> noticed that my hard drive light is on constantly and was wondering how I
> can determine what is accessing the hard disk so much.  After boot the hard
> disk is acting normally for a few minutes to a few hours and then the hard
> drive light is lit up constantly.
>
> I have tried ps -ef to see if there was anything running that I do not know
> about and there is not.  Is there any way for me to determine which process
> is consistently using the hard disk?

Yep,

# yum install iotop
# iotop

Recent kernels include per-process IO accounting, so you should be
able to tell what is waking up your disk by watching the iotop output.

--
Sam