How to know if the drive is a bottleneck

performanceresource-monitorssd

I have been on a performance monitoring expedition. I constantly watch Resource Monitor now and notice that my Disk activity, never really goes much above 10MB/sec.

I have a Samsung PRO 850, which has a SATA capability of 6GB/sec. I have noticed the new Samsung PRO 960 drives don't have the same SATA interface and instead have a new NVMe interface and supposedly is the reasons it is Hugely faster than the 850*.

My question, is would this new interface actually help my regular disk activity?

How do i tell if my drive is being bottle necked?

I don't actually have NVMe capability on my current hardware, if I determined my disk was bottle necked, Would adding another SSD and selectively moving high impact files to the second SSD help?

http://ssd.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Samsung-960-Pro-NVMe-PCIe-M2-512GB-vs-Samsung-850-Pro-256GB/m182182vs2385

Best Answer

Have a look in the performance Monitor (perfmon) for the 'Avg. Disk Queue Length' on that disk.

If it's anything above 0.0 (1.0 etc), then the system is waiting for the disk, and your disk is the bottleneck. If the wait stays below 0.1. (say 0.001) then the disk isn't being slow.

enter image description here

Related Question