Measuring response time to read a text file?

[tchjts1]

We are trying to do comprehensive monitoring of disk IO on our Windows servers. besides using the available perf_counters for measuring various disk IO metrics, we are thinking about this:

Having a very small text file (100 bytes) on the monitored hosts, and measure the amount of time it takes to read the file. Servers wouldn't necessarily be web servers, so using a web scenario wouldn't fit here.

Any thoughts on how to achieve this?

[richlv]

how would you distinguish between direct read, disk cache and operating system cache ?

on linux system 'time cat file' might do, but all the caching would make it quite useless...