How to find out what's accessing a particular hard drive on Windows? [duplicate]

Solution 1:

If you're using Windows Vista or newer, try Resource Monitor. Just type resmon into the Start menu search, or open Task Manager and click the "Resource Monitor" button on the Performance tab.

Once in Resource Monitor, go to the Disk tab. There you can see which processes are accessing your disks, and exactly which disks and which files they're accessing.

You can also check out Process Explorer (from Sysinternals). It's a bit more flexible and fully-featured, for instance you can set a filter to show only the processes that are accessing a particular disk or path.

Solution 2:

I don’t know of a program that can show you access by percentage (at least not through a built-in function), but if all you need to do is to see what program is heavily accessing the drive, you can use Process Monitor to see all file and folder accessed. You can select the Files filter to see only disk access and right-click anything that seems normal to filter it out to further reduce the clutter and winnow it down to just the unexpected/heavy access:

You can also export the data to a CSV file and open it in another program to graph a chart, but it’s probably much easier just to view the accesses live in the list.

(Personally I much prefer Filemon over ProcMon, but that only works in XP.)

DiskMon which shows direct disk access (i.e., to the disk itself as opposed to any specific files or folders, but it doesn’t show the process doing it.