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Comment by aljarry | Hacker News Reader

I regret neither Top neither Htop show you estimates of "IO Activity time" like in Windows 10 task manager - I need to use separate iostat to observe that.

I found the "IO Activity time", percentage of time when IO is used, to be a really good indicator of IO load on machine level - neither io-op per second, neither bandwith tell much if you're already using up all available IO. Load does not help here, as number of processes doing IO influences "load" more.

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To be fair it’s a far worse problem on Windows (although I guess a lot of my Linux machines are running from ram now so maybe I wouldn’t notice if it weren’t.)

You also need something like `nethogs` to view network IO, I wish there were a colored, htop-like utility for that as well.

In FreeBSD top(1) does show the IO statistics - just press “m”.

On Linux, that information is privileged, IIRC. so since most people use htop as an ordinary user, they wouldn't see that anyway.

Yeah, you need root or sudo to view iotop. But some information is (at least on some fresh ubuntu) available without elevation, like the per-disk output from iostat.

Where exactly can I find this in Windows' Task Manager? I don't see it as a column on the Details pane...

It's either on Performance tab (per disk) - the big chart is "active time", either per process on Processes tab as a column "Disk" - color is related to time usage, while the bandwidth is as text.

I'm a fan of iotop for monitoring various IO stats in a top-like interface.

pidstat is also good at showing IO Activity, per process.

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