A technician is troubleshooting a server that has slow performance. The performance monitoring tool provides the following information: Which of the following is the MOST likely cause of the poor…

Hard drive performance issues are identified by metrics such as high disk queue length (requests waiting for I/O), elevated average disk read/write times, and sustained disk utilization near 100%. These metrics indicate the storage subsystem cannot keep up with demand, directly causing application and OS slowdowns. Mechanical HDDs in particular are orders of magnitude slower than CPU or RAM operations, making them a common bottleneck.

Memory issues would manifest as high page file usage, excessive paging/swapping activity, or memory utilization at or near 100%, not the disk-centric metrics implied by the monitoring output.

CPU bottlenecks appear as sustained high processor utilization (near 100%) or long run queues, which would be clearly visible in the monitoring tool as CPU-specific counters.

Motherboard failures typically cause system instability, crashes, or POST errors rather than the consistent measurable performance degradation shown by a monitoring tool.