SQL Server: Is Your Database Server's Hard Drive Working Properly?

Few days back, a friend asked that “Is there any quick way to check database server hard drive health?”

Well, there are few performance counters which can help you to determine health of your database server hard drive. Among these counters two counter  are really important. These are Avg Disk Sec/Read and Avg Disk Sec/Write.

 These counters shows amount of time (in milliseconds) it takes to read from disk or write to disk. Standard value for both counters is 10 milliseconds and if your hard drive is taking more time, continuously, then surely, it’s the time to change your hard drive.

Other performance counters, which can help you to determine hard drive health, are as follow:

%Disk Time       (Percentage of time your had drive was busy)

                <85% is considered as average value as per BOL

Current Dist Queue Length

                Its value must be <2 per disk