iotop

As its name indicates, iotop is a top-like utility but for disk I/O. It shows a constantly updating list of processes, sorted by the amount of disk IO (read or write) they are performing. I find it useful to find out quickly which process is causing the disk to grind noisily. 😊

• Installing it is easy:

$ sudo apt install iotop

• To view all the processes, sorted by disk IO:

$ sudo iotop

Note how the tool requires root privileges to run.

• Since the tool displays all processes by default (whether they are doing I/O or not), I find it convenient to view only the processes that are actually doing any disk reads or writes:

$ sudo iotop -o

• By default, the tool updates once every second. To update the tool at a different delay interval, say every 2 seconds:

$ sudo iotop -d 2

Tried with: IOTop 0.6 and Ubuntu 14.04