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I'm beginning to monitor our servers disks and was wondering what would be the best option as to gathering statistics on % Disk Time, Disk Transfers/sec etc.

I can monitor both but my research didn't find anything about whether Logical of Physical disk was preferred.

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It really depends on why you are monitoring the disk. If you have an application performance reason it's usually simpler to montitor by logical disk. If you are looking to see if there is there is physical contention on a logical disk (eg drives C: and D: are on the same physical drives) then physical disk is better. If you are doing generic performance gathering than you should probably gather both.

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Depends on the drive layout. If you have multiple partitions per drive, or multiple drives per partition, HBA abstracted storage, or a mix... Sticking with Physical is usually the best idea for generic monitoring.

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For clarification, if a server has 5 disks: 2x RAID 1 3x RAID 5 I would monitor each physical drive. If I monitored the logical disk of the RAID 5 then I would be monitoring performance on the partition? – Rowell Nov 11 '11 at 17:55
Depends. I have a server with 2 large raids and my physical is the raid - hardware raid controller, windows does never see the real discs. – TomTom Nov 11 '11 at 18:18
@Rowell, what TomTom said; if you're using an HBA (RAID Controller) then Windows will see two Physical drives, but the queue depth on that would be very telling. Also, if you are using software RAID, then each disk in an array should show approximately the same statistics; if they're different, that would be very telling, like foretelling failure. – Chris S♦ Nov 11 '11 at 20:03
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