This monitor checks the Physical Disk Average Write Time. If you receive an alert from this monitor, action may be required in order to bring the system back to an operational state.

Physical Disk Average Write shows the time, in seconds, of the average disk write.

An unhealthy state indicates that the physical disk average disk write rate is currently high. A disk that is developing a bottleneck might cause the entire system to slow.

Circumstances that may cause this condition:

• Logic board or controller related problems.

• The hard drive interface speed can form a bottleneck to overall performance if it is too low for the hard disk's maximum sustained transfer rate.

• When available memory is low, the Virtual Memory Manager writes more pages to swap, resulting in increased disk activity.

• Upgrade or replace existing drive controllers with faster models.

• Confirm system has the maximum speed hard drive that it can support.

• Install separate drives on individual controller cards, spreading the read/write activities across multiple controllers, to increase overall performance.

• Be sure to set this threshold value appropriately for your specific storage hardware. The threshold value will vary according to the disk’s underlying storage subsystem. For example, the “disk” might be a single spindle or a large disk array. You can use Operations Manager overrides to define exception thresholds, which can be applied to specific computers or entire computer groups.