[CentOS] Disk Activity Monitor

Mon Feb 13 13:54:38 UTC 2006
James Pifer <jep at obrien-pifer.com>

I have a USB disk connected to a Poweredge server. The USB Disk is a Mad
Dog MegaVault with a 160GB drive installed. It's all working fine, but
the external LED on the unit is not working. 

I'm currently running a script (yum-pull) for setting up a yum mirror
and it sits for long periods of time seemingly doing nothing. I started
the script this morning at 6:20 for my FC4 yum mirror and it's now 8:50
and it's still running. A "top" shows very little activity from a CPU
perspective. 

The guy who wrote the script says there's probably tons of disk activity
going on. The script does continue to run because it will eventually
finish. One might think the slowness is because it's a USB drive, but I
can copy large amounts of data and do permission changes on files, at
the same time this script is running, and it all happens quickly. 

Guess I'm just trying to verify whether there really is a lot of disk
activity going on. I tried looking at ksysguard, but wasn't very
successful at seeing what I wanted. 

I'm not sure I want to use yum-pull if it take 3 hours to run per
mirror. Right now I'm mirroring FC4, but I also want to do Centos 4.0
and 4.2, and maybe even Suse 9.2. 

Are there any other disk activity monitors I should try? 

Thanks,
James