You might want to know what a good value is for Physical Disk: Transfers/sec. We'd love to give a simple answer, but we can't. We don't know anything about your hardware or applications software, and there are many factors that affect the answer.
So now you'll ask about the maximum Physical Disk: Transfers/sec. We don't know that either, for the same reason. Do you know the maximum speed your car can attain? How would you find out? By driving as fast as you could, of course. But where? Up a hill, or down? Around a Formula I race car track, or the Daytona Speedway? All these factors affect the highest speed you can attain with your car.
Similarly, a large set of factors determines the normal operating range for each Performance Monitor counter. You'll have to drive your system through a large number of conditions, or at least those of interest to you, and develop a sense for normal operating ranges for your equipment. You should record these typical values in Performance Monitor log files for future reference. Then, as you make changes in your workload or your hardware, you can refer to your earlier experience as a baseline.
We can help a little if you want to know the maximum values you can attain on various counters. Included on the disk that accompanies this book is a utility called Response Probe. Response Probe lets you place known, pure, predefined loads on your equipment. You can then characterize, in a disciplined way, the response surface of your computer—its response to pure loads. You can max out your disk drive, no problem, and in several different ways. By using Response Probe you can establish maximum counter numbers under a variety of known conditions and then use that logged information later when assessing real data.
The only counters that we can say much about immediately are the queue length counters. A little later on we talk about the relationship between queue lengths and utilization. But here we can make a simple statement: the apparent speed of the device is inversely proportional to the length of the waiting line. It's just like at the grocery store or the bank. In general, waiting lines longer than 2 are bad.