Analyse Disk Activities in Linux

To see disk activities, you can simply issue this command:

# e.g. on /dev/sda
$ cat /sys/block/sda/stat
626485464 806972148 28053848010 1557001361 853157995 3445307000 34392097768 2090234158        0 444939685 3653907428

Using iostat:

# Display every 5 seconds
$ iostat -xm -d 5

# Display on one disk
$ iostat -p /dev/sda -d 5