monitoring hard drive activity ?

[maccatalan]

Hello.

I reinstalled Tiger, clean install, made all updates, but now I notice a highly increased activity of my external hard drive. And I don't understand why. Spotlight is not indexing it and no applications are open.

So here is my question:
Is there a way to know what files are being written/read on a hard drive ?

I know that going to the Activity Monitor we can get what files are used by a given process. But here I don't know what process to monitor, so I was wondering if there was a way to list/monitor all hard drive activity from the command line or any simple utility you know. (we will avoid writting our own program that registers to the kernel events notifier ;-) )

Thank you,
Pierre.

[maccatalan]

before reinstalling my system I did lots of 'rm' on that external hard drive ... do you think the system would still try to keep track and clean all these previous actions ? (it's a journalized HFS+ volume) That would be amazing and very long/slow in time !

[ElDiabloConCaca]

Spotlight may indeed still be indexing that drive -- just because Spotlight allows you to search the drive and appears to be finished indexing it doesn't mean that it's totally done -- it will still go back and import other information from the files for a more complete Spotlight index. It may be indexing content from text/PDF files, or EXIF data from photos or optimizing the Spotlight database on that drive.

Running "top" in the Terminal, do you notice a process called "mdimport" taking up a few CPU cycles?