Sqlio Disk Subsystem Benchmark Tool

Disk Io Testing

SQLIO is not a part of SQL Server package despite its name, it is a tool provided by Microsoft which can be used to determine the I/O capacity or benchmark a given disk subsystem. Benefit of SQLIO is that, it allows us to identify hardware or I/O configuration issues before we deploy or install SQL Server by measuring I/O against one or more test files to measure I/Os per second (IOPs), throughput (MB/s), and latency. SQLIO does this by reading and writing files of different sizes. We can increase the file size to simulate the projected size of your database. We determine the saturation point of an I/O subsystem by gradually increasing the load.