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:

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