The DiskSim Simulation Environment Version 4.0 Reference Manual (CMU-PDL-08-101)

DiskSim is an efficient, accurate and highly-configurable disk system simulator developed to support research into various aspects of storage subsystem architecture. It includes modules that simulate disks, intermediate controllers, buses, device drivers, request schedulers, disk block caches, and disk array data organizations. In particular, the disk drive module simulates modern disk drives in great detail and has been carefully validated against several production disks (with accuracy that exceeds any previously reported simulator). It also includes a MEMS-based storage device module. This manual describes how to configure and use DiskSim, which has been made publicly available with the hope of advancing the state-of-the-art in disk system performance evaluation in the research community. The manual also briefly describes DiskSim’s internal structure and various validation results.