Measuring amount of data written to disk

Deicist

This is probably a pretty niche question, but I'm trying to find a way to measure exactly how much data my system is writing to disk. I'm guessing theres a way to do this using SNMP or something, but I'm having trouble tracking down exactly how to do it.

For some background...I'm currently developing an appliance using windows embedded and the system drive is going to be a flash memory based device. Now, the write protection options offered by windows embedded don't appear to fit our application very well, so we're wondering if we can just ditch them. We're using a 4GB DOM, the system uses about 1GB of that and we reckon if the system will last for 10 years or so without failing we'll be happy. So, to work out expected lifetime of the DOM I want to run the system for an hour or so, measure how much data has been written to the disk and then use that to extrapolate some sort of estimated lifetime.

Any ideas anyone?

ecco the dolphin

Are you able to get perfmon running on the embedded Windows system? (Start -> Run -> Perfmon on a normal Windows system - should be already installed)

If so, you might want to try seeing if you can get it to measure Physical Disc - Disc Write Bytes/Sec to see if it measures what you want.

If it does, maybe look into the performance monitoring API to write your own custom monitor that can total up the amount of disc writes over the hour you want to measure?

Hmm... browsing through some of the APIs, it doesn't explicitly say that it supports embedded Windows (whether CE or otherwise), but maybe it might?

vonPoonBurGer

Windows Embedded Standard 7? The WPA toolkit will capture all kinds of performance metrics, including disk (which in your case is flash memory) I/O.

Deicist

Nope, WES 2009.