Introduction This document describes how to use Microsoft’s SQLIO to test disk/SAN performance. It is biased towards SQL Server – which uses primarily 64KB and 8KB data pages so I am running the tests using those cluster sizes, however, other sizes can be specified. Download SQLIO from https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=20163 SQLIO is a command line tool with no GUI so you need to open a command prompt at C:\Program Files (x86)\SQLIO after you have installed it. Configuration First of all edit param.txt so that you create the test file we will be using. The file needs to be bigger than the combined RAID and on-board disk caches. In this case we are using a 50GB file. The “ 2” refers to the number of threads to use when testing, you don’t need to change this now. The “ 0x0” value indicates that all CPUs should be used, which you probably don’t want to change either, “ #” is a comment. The o...
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