Good Linux question — answering as the UphillTech team:
For disk I/O trending there are a few options. My personal favorite is the sar command from sysstat . By default, it gives output like this: 09:25:01 AM CPU %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle 09:35:01 AM all 0.11 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 99.88 09:45:01 AM all 0.12 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 99.86 09:55:01 AM all 0.09 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 99.90 10:05:01 AM all 0.10 0.00 0.01 0.02 0.01 99.86 Average: all 0.19 0.00 0.02 0.00 0.01 99.78 The %iowait is the time spent waiting on I/O. Using the Debian package, you must enable the stat collector via the /etc/default/sysstat config file after package...
Full answer by jordanm: https://unix.stackexchange.com/a/55215 (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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