Unfortunately, iotop requires Python >= 2.5 and a Linux kernel >= 2.6.20 to work, and even if the installation is very simple as presented in my last post, getting it to run on older distributions might not be so easy.

This article shows how you can watch your hard drive activity with iotop on Ubuntu 8.10 and Debian Lenny. iotop watches I/O usage information output by the Linux kernel (requires 2.6.20 or later) and displays a table of current I/O usage by processes or threads on the system. iotop displays columns for the I/O bandwidth [...]