A method for characterizing workload sequentiality for cache policy optimization includes maintaining an IO trace data structure having a rolling window of IO traces describing access operations on addresses of a storage volume. A page count data structure is maintained that includes a list of all of the addresses of the storage volume referenced by the IO traces in the IO trace data structure. A list of sequences data structure is maintained that contains a list of all sequences of the addresses of the storage volume that were accessed by the IO traces in the IO trace data structure. A sequence lengths data structure is used to correlate each sequence in the list of sequences data structure with a length of the sequence, and a histogram data structure is used to correlate sequence lengths and a number of how many of sequences of each length are maintained in the sequence lengths data structure.