IOPS–The Deceiving Metric of Storage Design

IOPS (input output per second) is a measure of disk performance that many organizations use to rate their storage arrays. The idea being that if a disk drive can read and write quickly to and from the platters then the total number of IOPS will be higher. The higher the number of IOPS the better the drive, in theory at least. Except when it comes to storage this conventional wisdom is not sound. The maximum potenti