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I am looking for a program/app that will show me the current data rate that is being written and/or read from the hard drive in real time, for the Mac.

I want to see the rate at which the hard drive is reading/writing when I'm rendering video files in After Effects and Final Cut.

Is there a program to do such a task??

quack quixote
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v15
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3 Answers3

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Open up the terminal and use the following command

while true ; do iostat -w 2 ; done

You will see something like this:

  0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  36 12 52  2.46 2.28 1.80
   23.81 135  3.14     0.00   0  0.00  41 13 46  2.46 2.28 1.80
    5.60  12  0.07     0.00   0  0.00  36 12 52  2.46 2.28 1.80
    8.00   1  0.01     0.00   0  0.00  37 12 51  2.34 2.26 1.80
    0.00   0  0.00     0.00   0  0.00  46 12 41  2.34 2.26 1.80
    4.00   1  0.01     0.00   0  0.00  38 11 51  2.15 2.22 1.79
   12.00   2  0.02     0.00   0  0.00  43 14 43  2.15 2.22 1.79
    4.00   4  0.02     0.00   0  0.00  72 15 13  2.15 2.22 1.79
    4.00   4  0.02     0.00   0  0.00  72 12 16  2.22 2.23 1.79
    4.00   3  0.01     0.00   0  0.00  62 13 24  2.22 2.23 1.79
speeds images
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  • `iostat` on OSX (tested on 10.9) actually repeats indefinitely when invoked as `iostat -w 2`, there is no need to use the while loop – Andre Holzner Mar 05 '14 at 11:50
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Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder should do this just fine.

MDMarra
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  • hmm, i'm finding that to be inaccurate. I'm writing files that are several gigabytes, and it shows that no data is being written. Is there another program out there that would do this? – v15 Jun 07 '10 at 15:30
  • Silly question, but how do you know Activity Monitor is inaccurate without an accurate tool? – Garry Jun 07 '10 at 15:32
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    @Garry: Did you miss the comment right above yours? He knows for sure he is writing some non-zero amount, and the activity monitor shows zero. Imagine I said "My speedometer is inaccurate...I'm driving, the car is moving, but it says zero MPH" and you asked "How do you know your speedometer is inaccurate without an accurate tool?" – davr Jun 07 '10 at 16:02
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    I have noticed there are to radio buttons in Activity Monitor under "Disk actitivty": "I/O" and "Data". You should probably check that. – Genba Jun 07 '10 at 16:51
  • @davr: I guessed I missed that bit, which makes my comment look a little silly :-) – Garry Jun 08 '10 at 17:18
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Have you tried iStats Menu? No longer free but it has a disk activity module.

Martin Marconcini
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