Active hard disk manager windows#

The real value may be 120% which the Avg. Thus, if you were looking at the %Disk Time counter, you would only see a value of 100%, which wouldn't represent the total potential of the entire system, but only that it had reached the potential of a single disk on a single controller. In these cases, the overall performance of the disk I/O system, which consists of two controllers, could exceed that of an individual disk. This counter will be needed in times when the disk configuration employs multiple controllers for multiple physical disks. This counter converts the %Disk Time to a decimal value and displays it. This counter is actually strongly related to the %Disk Time counter. Recall also that the disk could be a bottleneck prior to the % Disk Time reaching 100%. This counter indicates a disk problem, but must be observed in conjunction with the Current Disk Queue Length counter to be truly informative. You will see many similarities between the disk and processor since they are both transaction-based services. Much like % Processor time, this counter is a general mark of how busy the disk is.

Active hard disk manager windows#

Windows Performance Monitor Disk Counters Explained Disk Queue length value being greater than 1. This is the reason why you can see the % Disk Time being greater than 100%, all it takes is the Avg. Disk Queue Length is 0.37, then the %Disk Time will be 37.

Disk queue length is equal to 1, the %Disk Time will equal 100. It is the same value displayed in a different scale. Disk Queue Length” counter multiplied by 100. The “% Disk Time” counter is nothing more than the “Avg. However according to someone at Microsoft that's not quite true, although it still represents how busy your disk is, which relates to responsiveness and performance %Disk Time (% Disk Read Time, % Disk Write Time) Use Resource Monitor to monitor storage performance If your users are seeing performance issues, and you're seeing 100% active times, you might need faster or more disks.

If a disk is constantly running at very, very high levels (say, more than 80%), it may point to a storage-related bottleneck. This shows the percentage of time that the disk is not idle and is actively serving requests. the request queue is fullĪctive Time (%). Many sources that I can find said that 100% disk usage means the controller is saturating with requests, i.e. If you need bulk storage (very high capacity, like multiple terabytes): The best you can get are 10.000 RPM SAS Enterprise hard drives that offer: high sequential throughput (good for large files) and relatively low access times (in contrast to consumer HDDs). In general: An SSD is the way to go, if you need a fast and responsive system as it offers the best of both: high throughput and low access time The smaller the packet, the lower the latency. PCIe has a dynamic latency, based on the packet size (data is always sent in packets). Thunderbolt is even better, especially for audio where low latency is extremely important. USB 3, for example, has a lower latency than USB 2 because of changes in how the communication is done. Some buses have higher latencies than others. Yes: applications that utilize large files like games, Adobe After Effects and other large applications benefit from high throughput.Īpplications like your usual web browser, Office applications etc benefit from low access times to read caches and safe small files. Low random access time allows you to read many small files that are scattered around the storage device your usual use case for any kind of application outside of content creation (Photoshop, After Effects etc often create huge files)Īre certain apps going to cause a higher active time versus others? High throughput allows you to read large files fairly quickly, which helps with, well, large files or sequentially arranged files. You need a storage device (HDD or SSD) that has both: high throughput and low random access time. What properties in a hard drive should I buy to speed this up? (The disk transfer rate doesn't seem to relate) If you hit 99%, you are actually bottle-necked by the read/write performance of your HDD.

The higher the time/percentage, the more you utilize the HDD. The graph is literally taken a measure of time the HDD (in your case) is reading or writing data.ĭisk active time is the time the HDD is working.