There are a few tools available to perform block devices I/O monitoring and profiling.
Starting with iotop which we mentioned in the Exploring Yocto's tracing and profiling tools recipe, which gives a general idea of the throughput on a system and a particular process. Or iostat, which provides many more statistics regarding CPU usage and device utilization, but does not provide per process details. And finally blktrace that is a GPLv2 licensed tool which monitors specific block devices I/O at a low level, and can also compute
I/O operations per second (IOPS).
This recipe will explain how to use blktrace to trace block devices and blkparse, to convert the traces into human readable format.