What is Spotlight Telling me regarding Physical read per second (4286805)

I am getting an alarm on Physical read per second. What does that stat really tell me. It is pointing to a hardware issue. It has just started showing up.

It is saying that we are .50 blks/sec and the detail says that it has Datafile random read avg time is 700ms

The alarm is showing the rate at which blocks are read from disk by all server processes. The Datafile read time alarm becomes active if the average I/O time for these reads exceeds a threshold. You can try right clicking the alarm and select "Show Details | IO Summary" to launch the I/O drilldown; then hit F1 to find more information on the various charts