Resource Monitor Disk Queue Length - What does the green graph and blue line represent?

Question

Windows Resource Monitor shows a graph of Disk Queue Length. E.g.:

What does the green graph, and the blue line represent:

Research Effort

• In the Resource Monitor of Windows 7, what does the "disk queue length" really mean? (it's not Disk I/O and Highest Active Time)
• https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/the-enterprise-cloud/use-resource-monitor-to-monitor-storage-performance/
• Technet: Performance and Reliability Monitoring Getting Started Guide for Windows Server 2008
• https://serverfault.com/questions/280844/resource-monitor-disk-usage-scale

It is not Disk I/O and Highest Active Time

Don't forget, it is not Disk I/O and Highest Active Time, because it can't be both things for both graphs. Because both graphs are different.

• if it were the same thing
• for both graphs
• then both graphs would be the same

Also, one graph is Disk I/O (in MB/sec), and the other is Queue Length (in number).

Answer 1

Green is the Disk I/O in KB/second

Blue is % Highest active time

Answer 2

Windows 10 fixed the issue, and the confusion.

The confusion was that:

• each Physical Disk had a blue line
• which supposedly represented "highest active time"

But then how can every Physical Disk have the same highest active time?

Answer: they don't. The blue line has nothing to do with any particular physical disk.

So in Windows 10 the blue line was removed from everything except the aggregated pseudo-physical disk "Disk".