Most Linux admins are not aware of hidden switch (undocumented switch) called -D. The -D option display a nice summery of disk I/O subsystem since boot time. Output includes total time spent reading and writing data, merged reads and merged writes (kernel disk i/o optimization technique) and other parameters.
I’ve already written about finding out Linux / UNIX cpu utilization using various tools. You can use same iostat command to find out disk utilization and for monitoring system input/output device loading by observing the time the physical disks are active in relation to their average transfer rates. iostat syntax for disk utilization report iostat [...]