I would like to measure the number of disk seeks that are made by a process under Windows. If I open Task Manager, I can see a column named "I/O - reads". Is this the equivalent of disk seeks? Can I conclude that if a process is making 120 disk seeks on a 7200 RPM harddisk, then it is utilizing 100% of capacity?
This is relevant for ServerFault, because it enables me to estimate how heavy my application will be on a file server once it is in the production environment.
I would user perfmon (built into xp/2003 and upwards, type perfmon in your run box).
Make a new counter set and ad some counters from the PhysicalDisk performance object. There are several that may be of interest to you, like disk reads per second and split i/o per second.
I think disk reads/sec and disk writes/sec is what you are after. I would then compare them with the IO read/Write operations/sec from the process object for your process.
the perfmon counter you want to measure how heavily a disk is utilized is physical disk\%disk read time. There is no counter that specifically measures individual seeks, nor would that be any indicator of how any application would impact a file server since windows abstracts the disk. A better indicatgion of how your application will impact a system is to look at logical disk\average disk read queue length for a reasonabale sample interval for your application, as well as process\page faults/sec