How to Monitor Drive Activity on Windows 11

1. Accessing Task Manager

You can open Task Manager by pressing Ctrl + Shift + Esc or right-clicking on the taskbar and selecting Task Manager.

2. Disk activity overview

Click on the Performance tab. Here, you will see a summary of your CPU, memory, disk, and network usage. Select Disk to get a detailed look at real-time disk activity, including read and write speeds.

• Check the Active time section to review the percentage of reads and writes over time (every 60 seconds). It is also represented in the main Active time graph.
• The Average response time information indicates the amount of time it takes for a hard drive or solid-state drive to respond to a read or write request from the operating system.
• Read speed and Write speed claim the current speeds of the drive, which also corresponds to the Disk transfer rate graph.

By the way, under the Processes tab, you can sort the running processes by disk usage to identify which applications are currently utilizing your disk the most.

1. Launching Resource Monitor

You can access it by searching for Resource Monitor in the Start menu or through the performance tab of the Task Manager by clicking on Open Resource Monitor at the bottom.

2. Navigate to the Disk tab.

Here, you can view detailed information about disk activity, including total disk usage, specific process activity, and disk queue length.

3. Viewing Processes

Check the Processes with Disk Activity section to read and write speeds (Bytes per second) for processes that are currently using or have recently used disk resources.

4. Click on Disk Activity.

Check the read and write speeds for each of the system processes. Then, check the overall operations per second (IOPS) or bandwidth in the Disk Activity tab header.

On the right side, you'll find graphs for each drive available on your computer. The top graph displays the IOPS (Input /Output Operations Per Second) for the drives, while the Queue Length graphs offer insights into drive performance.

For instance, a high queue length indicates that the disk is overwhelmed and struggling to keep up with incoming read and write requests. This situation results in numerous requests waiting to be processed, leading to delays and often correlating with reduced drive performance. Conversely, a low queue length generally shows that the disk is efficiently managing read and write requests, with few or no pending requests. This efficiency allows programs to access data swiftly, meaning overall good drive performance.