Hard Drives IOPS

Found and interesting topic over the weekend. A topic which most of us overlook during the design of a storage infrastructure.

We all do concern about the speed if the data transfer between storage and host, the network bandwidth, and that RAID configuration used, while we always forgot about the IOPS.

For some of us out there who wondering what is IOPS, "IOPS (Input/Output Operations Per Second, pronounced i-ops) is a common performance measurement used to benchmark computer storage devices like hard disk drives (HDD), solid state drives (SSD), and storage area networks (SAN). As with any benchmark, IOPS numbers published by storage device manufacturers do not guarantee real-world application performance" - Wikipedia (on layman term)

The table I found below to remind myself of the ball park IOPS figure of various type of common hard drives:

Device	Type	IOPS	Interface
7,200 rpm	HDD	~75-100 IOPS[2]	SATA 3 Gb/s
10,000 rp	HDD	~125-150 IOPS[2]	SATA 3 Gb/s
15,000 rp	HDD	~175-210 IOPS [2]	SAS
Simple SL	SSD	~400 IOPS[citation needed]	SATA 3 Gb/s
Intel X25-	SSD	~8,600 IOPS[11]	SATA 3 Gb/s
Intel X25-	SSD	~5,000 IOPS[13]	SATA 3 Gb/s
G.Skill Ph	SSD	~20,000 IOPS[citation needed]	SATA 3 Gb/s
OCZ Verte	SSD	Up to 60,000 IOPS[citation needed]	SATA 6 Gb/s
Texas Me	SSD	120,000+ Random Read/Write IOPS[17]	PCIe
Fusion-io	SSD	140,000 Read IOPS, 135,000 Write IOPS [18]	PCIe
Virident S	SSD	320,000 sustained READ IOPS using 4KB blocks and 200,000 sustained WRITE IOPS using 4KB blocks [19]	PCIe
OCZ Revo	SSD	200,000 Random Write 4K IOPS [21]	PCIe
Fusion-io	SSD	250,000+ IOPS [22]	PCIe
Violin Me	SSD	250,000+ Random Read/Write IOPS[23]	PCIe /FC/Infiniband/iSCSI
DDRdrive	SSD	300,000+ (512B Random Read IOPS) and 200,000+ (512B Random Write IOPS)[24][25][26][27]	PCIe
OCZ Singl	SSD	Up to 500,000 IOPS [28]	PCIe
Texas Me	SSD	600,000+ Random Read/Write IOPS[29]	PCIe
Texas Me	SSD	1,000,000+ Random Read/Write IOPS[30]	FC / InfiniBand
Fusion-io	SSD	1,180,000+ Random Read/Write IOPS[31]	PCIe
OCZ 2x Su	SSD	Up to 1,200,000 IOPS[28]	PCIe