Real time writing to disk

Solution 1:

Process Monitor from Microsoft's SysInternals team should do what you need. From the site: "Process Monitor is an advanced monitoring tool for Windows that shows real-time file system, Registry and process/thread activity."

Note: Process Monitor is a different utility to the excellent Process Explorer from the same authors.

Solution 2:

I highly recommend Resource Monitor which comes with Windows 7.

In the Disk tab you can view what processes are accessing the disk and what files are being accessed. You can filter the processes and sort according to criteria such as Write and Read speed etc.

This program is so useful I've mapped it to Ctrl + Alt + End