Recipe 7.3. Enabling Disk Performance Statistics

Problem

You want to monitor disk performance and you need to enable performance statistics.

Solution

On Windows 2000, run the following command and then reboot:

> diskperf -y

On Windows XP, all disk performance statistics are enabled by default.

Discussion

With Windows NT, both logical and physical disk performance counters were disabled by default. With Windows 2000, physical disk counters were enabled and logical disk counters were disabled. With Windows XP, both logical and physical disk counters are enabled. Logical and physical disk counters were disabled by default in previous versions of the OS because of the concern that the impact to performance would be too great to have them on all the time. As disk access times have steadily improved over the years, the performance hit has become negligible. Now, you can safely have both physical and logical disk counters enabled on either Windows 2000 or Windows XP.

Within Performance Monitor, the LogicalDisk and PhysicalDisk objects contain the counters that are available when disk performance statistics are enabled.

See Also

MS KB 253251, "Using Diskperf in Windows 2000"