Arch Linux

lainlover

Member

Registered: 2024-04-01

Posts: 19

[SOLVED] Monitor IO usage on specific drive

I have a dual drive setup, with an SSD for root and home and an HDD for storage and file sharing (ftp, torrent, ...). Part of the reason for this is to not have to worry about the inherent TBW limits of SSDs.
How can I make sure that the IO usage for these file sharing applications is indeed limited to my HDD? I've looked into a few options but none of them seem to do what I need:
- iotop can't differentiate between drives
- iostat for some reason can't see the HDD activity
- lsof kind of works but only if I already have a process or file in mind, not for the large picture
Ideally I'd get an overview of all IO usage on the system, discriminated by drive. Any ideas?

Last edited by lainlover (2024-05-12 09:44:46)

Anakievs

Member

Registered: 2023-06-12

Posts: 20

Re: [SOLVED] Monitor IO usage on specific drive

Try dool like that.

dool --bytes -dD sda,sdb1,sdc3

dool is a fork of dstat.

Edit: Try also conky.

Last edited by Anakievs (2024-05-11 16:50:28)

just4arch

Member

Registered: 2023-01-07

Posts: 126

Re: [SOLVED] Monitor IO usage on specific drive

Looks like division by 8 is missing.

Yep, it's using bits, try using dool with

--bytes

@OP
If your SSD is just somewhat recent, you probably don't have to worry about writes.
That said, you can always jail your programs and confine them to certain directories.

Anakievs

Member

Registered: 2023-06-12

Posts: 20

Re: [SOLVED] Monitor IO usage on specific drive

Yep, it's using bits, try using dool with

--bytes

Thank you!

lainlover

Member

Registered: 2024-04-01

Posts: 19

Re: [SOLVED] Monitor IO usage on specific drive

Thanks for the help everyone. dool does in fact offer what I am looking for here - it can even generate CSV output with the --output flag.
The results are a bit difficult to make sense of in text form but piping them into a graphing utility shows that, as desired, only the HDD is being used for the IO intensive applications

If your SSD is just somewhat recent, you probably don't have to worry about writes.
That said, you can always jail your programs and confine them to certain directories.

Marking the topic as closed, but would like to know more about how to go about using firejail for this

Last edited by lainlover (2024-05-12 09:45:56)

Anakievs

Member

Registered: 2023-06-12

Posts: 20

Re: [SOLVED] Monitor IO usage on specific drive

I have a dual drive setup, with an SSD for root and home and an HDD for storage and file sharing (ftp, torrent, ...). Part of the reason for this is to not have to worry about the inherent TBW limits of SSDs.

Here is another approach I use for compiling and other write intensive stuff. If you have enough RAM you can make ram directory.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/tmpfs