IOPS — Input/Output Operations Per Second

Context & Usage

IOPS is the dominant performance metric for databases, virtualization, and any workload with many small random accesses. Different drive types have wildly different IOPS: SATA HDD ~100-200 IOPS; SAS 15K HDD ~500 IOPS; SATA SSD ~50,000-100,000 IOPS; NVMe SSD ~500,000-2,000,000 IOPS. IOPS varies by block size (typically benchmarked at 4 KB), queue depth (parallel I/O), and read/write mix.