I 've a question related to design of file systems. These days we are seeing the proliferation of many file systems mostly related to handling large datasets and providing high availability and speed. 

I would like to know that from a file system designer and developer standpoint, how do we evaluate the performance and availability of our file-system? Are there any benchmarks that we can run? How do we test the code that is written to create a file system design?

If I want to just write a distributed file system for academic purposes, would it be mandatory for me to have multiple disks or can I fake that effect somehow?