How do I find out what processes are accessing the hard disk in a GNU/Linux-based system?

How do I find out what processes are accessing the hard disk in a GNU/Linux-based system? I'm looking for the equivalent to top for disk access, so I can tell which process(es) are currently reading and/or writing to disk. I'm currently using Ubuntu, but I imagine there's a standard tool that's available as part of the GNU toolset.
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bert [Entry]

You got three-fifths of the answer right yourself - the one you want is called iotop. Search for it in the extra repositories, it should be there.

bert [Entry]

iotop is the counterpart to top that watches I/O usage information. If you want detailed information on the files opened by a process, or the list of files opened in a directory, or watch over files in the whole system, use lsof.lsof is quite versatile and provides information about open tcp, udp, NFS connections too.