In this section, we evaluate the performance of the prototype MimdRAID under two sets of experiments. The first set of experiments is based on playing real-world file system and transaction processing traces on the MimdRAID simulator. The second set of experiments is based on running on the prototype itself a synthetic workload generator that is designed to stress it in ways beyond what is possible with the traces. The purposes of the experiments are to: 1) validate the models of Section 2, 2) show the effectiveness and importance of workload-driven configuration, and 3) demonstrate the use of scaling the number of disks as a cost-effective means of improving performance for certain workloads.