Studies on Windows I/O systems are confined to global performance benchmarking and explanations. Users willing to optimize their I/O systems do not know which tool to use, and up to what point it will effectively represent their applications.

In this paper, we describe a toolbox allowing developers and computer architects to better dimension and optimize their I/O systems according to application needs and constraints on single disk architectures.

Our toolbox is based on the complementarity of benchmarking and simulation. Its use prevents from having critical I/O performance gaps and helps choosing the optimal I/O strategy. In fact, we observed for the same initial I/O pattern, very frequent dramatic performance drops by a factor three while just changing the access mode or request sizes.