A collection of disk traces is used in my research to test performance of storage systems. These traces were collected from laptops running real user applications and represent typical multi-tasking user environment. User activity includes browsing files and folders, emailing, text editing, surfing the web, listening to music and playing movies, editing pictures, and running office applications.

The characteristics of these traces are in-line with expected I/O traffic for personal computer workloads reported by Hsu and Smith [1]. The average I/O per second ranges from 1.6 Mbps to 3.5 Mbps. These PC workloads generate 4.6 to 21.35 I/O requests per second with an average request size of 26 KB. Although this average request size is much higher than 7-9 KB expected by [1], it is weighted by a small number of large files. Average request size is skewed by occasional very large write requests (of size 64 KB and higher). Also I/O traffic in our workloads is bursty, localized and balanced. I/O requests arrive in groups, frequently access localized areas of the disk, and are partitioned rougly 50:50 between reads and writes.

Our disk traces are publicly available and you can find them in DiskSim ascii format here. These traces are filtered and only include requests sent to the storage system. More details on the traces, including file system information and system/user process information is also publicly available. Please contact me for the detailed (non-filtered) versions of our traces.

References:

[1] W. Hsu and A. J. Smith. "Characteristics of I/O Traffic in Personal Computer and Server Workloads." IBM Systems Journal, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 347-372, April 2003.