One of the most annoy­ing thing for me is to hear this click­ing noise com­ing from my hard drive. Last day, while I was try­ing to con­cen­trate on some algo­rithms, there was this sound com­ing out of my lap­top which was start­ing to drive me crazy. The fre­quency was con­stant and con­tin­u­ous, so I asked myself how to find out eas­ily which process was doing that, and even­tu­ally kill it. Few min­utes of googling, and I found Iotop. This pro­gram (writ­ten in python) out­puts the hard drive activ­ity just as the “top” com­mand does. It is not avail­able for Hardy, but will be in Intre­pid. Since then, you can eas­ily get it work­ing by run­ning iotop.py directly inside the com­pressed archive.

Here is a screenshot:

Iotop

The faulty app was caused by a java applet ! I closed the tab in fire­fox and the sound stopped.