How to detect if a disk is seeking?

I can use a variety of tools to measure the volume of disk I/O currently flowing through the system (such as iotop and iostat) but I'm curious if it's possible to easily detect if a disk is seeking a lot with only a small amount of I/O. I know it;s possible to extract this information using blktrace and then decode it using btt but these are somewhat unwieldy and I was hoping there was a simpler alternative?