Tool to show processes writing to the hard drive?

Question

Is there a tool that will show me what applications are writing to the hard drive in real time? I'm thinking something like Task Manager but for I/O. I've got a number of background processes running, and can never tell when Visual Studio is holding everything up, or some other process is hogging the disk (especially when the processor is running at less than 20%).

Answer 1

Process Explorer from Microsoft SysInternals. You can view this info about all processes at once, or get even more detailed information when you double-click on a single process.

This is one of those tools I can't live without.

_{(source: microsoft.com)}

_{(source: microsoft.com)}

Answer 2

One can retrieve information on processes writing to disk by opening the Windows Task Manager --> Performance --> Resource Monitor

Resource Monitor can drill down to disk usage by process: