Windows sysinternals

338 Part II Usage Guide
disk), Diskmon reports events that involve the physical disk. For every disk read and write,
Diskmon identifies the disk and sector numbers, the amount of data read or written, and the
duration of the operation. You can also run Diskmon as a taskbar notification area icon where
it acts as a disk activity light, appearing as a green LED when there is disk read activity and as
a red LED when there is disk write activity.
Diskmon requires administrative rights, and it works on all supported versions of Windows.
As you can see in Figure 12-3, Diskmon assigns a sequence number to each event and
displays it in the first column. If Diskmon’s internal buffers are overflowed during extremely
heavy activity, this will be reflected with gaps in the sequence numbers.
FIGURE 12-3 Diskmon.
The Time column indicates the number of seconds elapsed between the start of the trace
and when the request was initiated. This trace start is reset when you clear the results by
pressing Ctrl+X or clicking the Clear toolbar button. You can choose to display clock time
in this column instead (with or without milliseconds) from the Options menu. The Duration
column indicates how long the requested read or write operation took to complete, in
seconds.
Note that the Disk column reports the zero-based disk number, not a partition or volume
number, and that a hard disk can have multiple volumes associated with it. The Length
column indicates the number of sectors that were read or written. Most hard disk sectors are
512 bytes.
The menu and toolbar buttons work the same as in many other Sysinternals monitoring
utilities. Press Ctrl+E to toggle data capture on and off. Choose Save or Save As from the File
menu to write the displayed results to a tab-delimited text file. Toggle Autoscroll on to keep
the most recently captured events displayed. Search for specific text in the results by pressing
Ctrl+F, and repeat searches with F3. Limit how many events to retain and discard older
events by setting the History Depth. Select one or more rows and copy their contents to the
www.it-ebooks.info