For disk I/O trending there are a few options. My personal favorite is the sar command from sysstat. By default, it gives output like this:
09:25:01 AM CPU %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
09:35:01 AM all 0.11 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 99.88
09:45:01 AM all 0.12 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 99.86
09:55:01 AM all 0.09 0.00 0.01 0.00 0.00 99.90
10:05:01 AM all 0.10 0.00 0.01 0.02 0.01 99.86
Average: all 0.19 0.00 0.02 0.00 0.01 99.78
The %iowait is the time spent waiting on I/O. Using the Debian package, you must enable the stat collector via the /etc/default/sysstat config file after package installation.
To see current utilization broken out by device, you can use the iostat command, also from the sysstat package:
$ iostat -x 1
Linux 3.5.2-x86_64-linode26 (linode) 11/08/2012 _x86_64_ (4 CPU)
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
0.84 0.00 0.08 1.22 0.07 97.80
Device: rrqm/s wrqm/s r/s w/s rsec/s wsec/s avgrq-sz avgqu-sz await svctm %util
xvda 0.09 1.02 2.58 0.49 112.79 12.11 40.74 0.15 48.56 3.88 1.19
xvdb 1.39 0.43 4.03 1.82 43.33 18.43 10.56 0.66 112.73 1.93 1.13
Some other options that can show disk usage in trending graphs is munin and cacti.