There are many components involved with reading and writing data to files. Starting from an application (SQL Server or SQLIOSim) the IO request is handed over to the Operating system via an API call. Once in the hands of the OS the request will travel through levels of filter drivers installed by things like antivirus software, backup utilities and finally find its way to a driver that will hand the actual data over to a disk controller, and eventually find its way to a disk or array of disks. There may be caching on the disks, and in the case of high end arrays there may also be logic to determine whether or not to service the request immediately or defer. If even one of these pieces get it wrong the results for your data would be disastrous.
Wouldn’t you rather know there is a problem before you entrust your data to such a complex process?
SQLIOSim is designed to generate exactly the same type and patterns of IO requests at a disk subsystem as SQL Server would, and verify the written data exactly as SQL Server would.
More details and download links are available here
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