Today I was viewing the performance statistics in task manager on Server 2012 R2, and noticed that disk performance is not included, in contrary to showing up on my Windows 10 machine’s task manager. Apparently Microsoft decided to turn off the disk performance counters by default in Windows Server as it was quite a performance hit when having to query all the disk IO on some systems. A way around this would be to go to the resource monitor, but in case you still want them in task manager we can easily toggle the disk performance statistics with the built-in diskperf utility.
To enable disk performance:
Open an administrative command shell, enter the following:
diskperf -Y
Now open task manager (close and re-open if it was still open), and you should see the disk statistics.
To disable disk performance:
In case you later want to disable them again, again open an administrative command shell, and enter the following:
diskperf -N
note: the diskperf utility mentions it will start collecting when the system is restarted. On my test system (running server 2012 R2) it worked fine without a restart.