Hard Disk Usage
 

My new case doesnt have a Hard disk light on it to see disk activity.

Is there any software available to view disk activity say in the system tray for example?

Thanks.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

Just use task manager built into windows shows all your disks

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

Is there any reason you would need to see disk activity? Not sure any cases have had that recently especially as it's all SSD now and not spinning disc drives.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

He'll be asking if you can add a 3.5" diskette/floppy drive next. lol.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

You can get USB Floppy drives

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

Who says its all SSD ? If you want large capacity storage drives, at a reasonable price, HDDs are still cheaper. SSD are more useful for system drives.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

I scrapped all my mechanical drives due to noise. I could hear then ( had 5x4TB) and they wound me up now had 3x 4TB M.2 and 3 x 4 TB sata ssds

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

:shrug:
I have a 6TB, and a 13TB.
The PC fan makes more noise than they do.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

Not many people use mechanical drives on a daily use system anymore. They are slow and noisy. Yes they are still fine for NAS or backup storage etc. But for daily use like gaming or just general booting windows etc SSD, whether it's NVME M.2 or normal sata SSD drives offer decent capacity now for most things.

Mechanical is too slow for any kind of normal use.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

Change ya fan curve haha

---------- Post added at 23:40 ---------- Previous post was at 23:38 ----------

Hi capacity storage mech is still king and they tend to warn you pre fail where as SSDs just die

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

Just what i need. Thanks.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

Why is it you need to see disk access etc?

Not something I ever think about.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

I like to see if the disk is in use from time to time if system stops responding.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

Task Manager not only shows you if the disk is being accessed it also shows you what is hogging processes and allows you to end the task of anything being naughty. You do not need a 3rd party piece of software

I think for some reason maybe my lower post count or time here but my responses to Tech based questions seem to just get ignored on this forum but I really really know what I am talking about

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

You ain't being ignored bud. Your advice is sound. Task manager does everything you could need for managing tasks etc.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

Must admit, if my system stops responding, I find a reboot is usually the best way to sort it in the first instance. I'd only dig deeper if the problem returned and then I'd be delving in to the built in Windows tools to find the issue. But each to their own I suppose.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

The original question was to check disk activity and the op chose for a 3rd party piece of software when Task Manager shows it . That was my point

I have DISKMON and it monitors all my C drive activity.....

It says it works on ALL OS's (This is before sysinternals was taken over and all that EULA stuff was added)

See if it works for you buddy

http://web.archive.org/web/20051104084419/http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/Diskmon.html (Click the Win2000 and higher zip file)


I hope it works :)

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

EULAs have always been around. It's the end user licence agreement.

As has been mentioned though, no real need to use 3rd party software, windows has its own software to monitor it and many other bits of hardware now.

With SSDs functioning differently to old HDDs checking for read/write isn't really needed.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

But u have to press alt. ctrl, and del each time u want to view it, i want something that's a little easier to view.

We all have different views on software and what we want, why not just accept some people want different things than u?

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

You most certainly do not. You right click the taskbar and select it or press CTRL Shift and ESC or if you want something more permanent right click on the desktop select new (or more options if on new windows 11 menu) short cut and enter taskmgr.exe you then have a shortcut you can pin anywhere

I accept other people want different things than me but I know what I am doing

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

Each to their own though. Even with quite a high end PC I can't have anything running in the background that's not needed, no widgets or anything. I don't install anything to run at start up apart from the absolute essentials. CPU idles at around 1-2% if not then I know something ain't right. Old habits are hard to break.

Yes Corey which is why I offered you DISKMON.... It sounds like it does exactly what you want and its very useful!

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

Yes and im gonna give it a shot.

Thanks.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

If it still runs on modern windows. Dude is famous for living in the past still running an ancient PC with a very very outdated version of windows.

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

It should - Diskmon is maintained by Sysinternals, which is now actually Winternals, part of Micro$oft.

Yes and its incredible all it shows.... Have ya ever tried it Paul??

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

You would not have seen the latest version of Task Manager and what that shows would you ?

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

It's built in to windows now. Task Manager now show all you could possibly need to know.

Ah yes the performance tab...

I take it there is more on it now :)

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

So much more and much better looking too.

I dont wanna sound ignorant Steve but what is paged and non paged memory??

See in my picture it said 636 paged right then.. Does that mean actual ram that was in use at that time??

EDIT:

Now it says 2552 paged

Re: Hard Disk Usage
 

When your ram gets saturated some of the load is offset to hard drive space. Obviously this is very slow in comparison. None paged will always use real ram paged can use virtual memory if needed

Thank you Jay,

I can assume Im using Paged Memory ALOT seeing as I only have 56.8 Megs of physical ram........

Right now it says 5704 Paged and 24336 Nonpaged..

If I was using my swap file right now wouldnt the paged amount be alot higher??

Riight now my swap ffile is only 44 Megs. (Sometimes its well over 100)

Its all fascinating...........